Watch Me Disappear

by Janelle Brown

  Lim is leaning forward now, his breath fogging the pristine surface of his glass desk as he grows more animated. “You have to leave behind anything that’s GPS-enabled—your car, your phone. You have to stay away from email and social media linked to your old identity, of course, because we can tell if you’ve logged in. Avoid places you might once have gone. Leave behind absolutely everything, including photos and sentimental mementos that might give you up. Give your laptop a thorough scour of anything suspicious. And when you set up your new identity, you have to make sure you don’t rely on any giveaway details from your old life that might wind up in a searchable database.” He smiles, gleeful. “I’ve caught people because they just transposed their Social Security number, or made a new name out of an anagram of their old one, or signed up for a new online account with the same login name. I know all the mistakes.”

  Jonathan thinks about it. Was this why Billie hired Calvin Lim? Did she come to him and ask him to help her lose herself in a way so complete that she would never be found? He imagines her with a prepaid phone and an untraceable email account, carefully staging her exit; starting a new life somewhere with a fake passport and a name bearing no resemblance to her own and a shelf bereft of sentimental photographs.

  He tries to wrap his head around this, struggling to reconcile it with the wife he was married to for so long. And yet. He thinks of Billie’s words again: You can always walk away. Didn’t she do that before, more than once? She’d left several lives behind by the time he met her. But those were bad situations, lives that should have been left behind.

  And yet how can you ever really know the truth about another person? We all write our own narratives about the people we know and love, he realizes. We choose the story that’s easiest to tell, the one that best fits our own vision for our lives. We define them in the way that’s most convenient for our own sense of self-aggrandizement. Glossing over anything that doesn’t fit into that neat little narrative because we don’t want the whole fiction to fall apart. In his own happy Billie-Olive-and-Jonathan narrative, theirs was the ideal life that Billie would never want to walk away from. In her version, maybe it wasn’t.

  He feels ill. He stares at the slightly flushed face of Calvin Lim and can’t help wondering if this stranger actually knows something about his wife that he does not. If he knows that Billie is alive and, if so, where she is.

  “OK,” Jonathan says slowly. “Let’s say I don’t have access to the databases that you do. But I want to figure out if someone I thought was dead is actually alive and just pretending to be dead.” He studies Calvin Lim’s face to gauge his reaction—Does this scenario sound familiar to you, hmm?—but Lim gives him nothing in return. “What clues would I need to look for?”

  Lim is quiet for a moment. “Well, the first place to look would be electronic bank transactions,” he says, drawing his words out. “If you want to disappear, you need cash, right? So a history of suspiciously large cash withdrawals, or even smallish ones that stretch over a prolonged period of time.”

  Jonathan thinks of their depleted savings account. “OK. And?”

  “Go through the person’s laptop. Web history, emails, calendar, photos, anything that doesn’t look quite right.”

  “I’ve done that. That’s how I found you.”

  Lim looks hard at him and then glances at the clock. “Sorry, that’s fifteen minutes.”

  That’s not enough, thinks Jonathan frantically. “One last question?” he asks.

  Lim folds his hands again, pressing his thumbs together until the tips of both fingers turn white with pressure. “OK, just one.”

  “What would you do to catch someone—this person?” Jonathan asks carefully. “If they don’t want to be found. One trick that you would use to trip them up.”

  Lim releases his hands from their grip and flexes his fingers as he thinks. The fountain burbles and slaps against its decorative stones; outside the office door, a burst of voices disappears slowly down the hall. Finally, Lim speaks. “I’d make an IP address trap,” he says. “Mock up a website about the missing—the dead—person, you know, memories of them, or asking for information, or something along those lines. And then track the IP addresses of the people who come to check it out. People who disappear themselves—they want to know if they’ve gotten away with it. They can’t resist looking themselves up on the Internet to see what friends and family are saying about them. So you set up this site and then watch to see if there’s an IP address that comes back over and over. Odds are, that’s your man.” He looks at Jonathan, assessing. “Or woman.”

  “Thanks,” Jonathan says. “That was very helpful.” He stands up and pulls out his billfold, counting out a fistful of bills and placing these on the desk. Lim glances at the pile of money and gives a small nod. As Jonathan walks to the door, he hears the soft murmur of Lim’s voice behind him:

  “Good luck,” he says. “I hope you find her.”

  —

  Jonathan drives blindly back across the bay, his mind so muddled that he barely registers the locked-in traffic or the formidable rotting smell from last week’s spilled latte emitting from the backseat of his Prius. The victorious white spire of the new Bay Bridge passes overhead; in the distance, the cranes of the Port of Oakland crouch like praying mantises, surrounded by the carcasses of empty freight containers.

  He arrives back home just before five and pulls into the empty driveway. He cuts the engine, momentarily incapable of leaving the confined safety of the car, the warmth of the seat against his back. Outside the car, the street is dark, the lights in the crumbly old Craftsman homes ticking on one by one. Across the street, in a house owned by an old-school Berkeley hippie holdout, an army of rainbow flags—pinwheels, fish kites, whirligigs, windsocks, sticking out of the lawn and hanging from the oak trees and jammed in among the ferns—flap in a synchronized frenzy as the wind picks up.

  His own house is dark. Olive isn’t home. Looking up at the void of her window, he remembers that Olive is at her first appointment with the therapist, Meredith Albright. It strikes him with a wave of guilt that he’s been trying to get Olive to stop believing Billie is alive at the exact moment when he has seized on the same thread.

  He sits there, his mind filling with hypothetical scenarios: his wife, instead of dying out there in the middle of Desolation Wilderness, hiking back out and back to life. And what, catching a bus? There wasn’t exactly a lot of public transportation out in the woods, and there was a manhunt going on, so someone surely would have noticed her. No, the more likely scenario was an accomplice of some sort, someone with a car. Presumably the person she was spending her weekends with.

  He climbs from the car and shoulders his way through the damp air to his front door. Inside, he clicks on the heat and walks directly to the office, depositing his laptop on the desk. He begins yanking out desk drawers, pulling out file folders and examining their labels, marked in Billie’s neat penmanship. PHONE BILLS—REPORT CARDS—CABLE—BANK STATEMENTS. He disgorges the contents of this last folder, fanning out several years’ worth of account statements before him.

  It doesn’t take very long to find what he’s looking for. He releases a long rush of air, only then realizing that he’s barely breathed since he left Calvin Lim’s office. In the last year of her life, Billie started making regular cash withdrawals from their savings account. At first just a few hundred here and there, and then sums up to a thousand. All in, roughly $19,500 disappeared this way, putting the dismal state of their savings account in a whole new light. (He also flags, with grim confirmation, two payments made to LPRS, Inc., in May and then again in October. Of course: Lim & Partners Research Services.) Maybe Jonathan would have noticed the money slowly vanishing if he’d bothered to do their monthly accounting. But he never did, and Billie would have known that, so the slow attrition had slipped right past him.

  Almost twenty thousand dollars—it’s not enough to live on forever. But perhaps long enough, especially if she fled s
omewhere cheap, like Mexico. Or had someone else to share expenses with.

  There it is, proof of some sort. He stares at the pile of papers and then, with a swift swipe of his palm, sends them tumbling to the floor. His whole body is quivering with fury, and when he tries to still his shaking hands by gripping the edge of the desk, he notices the battered wedding band on his ring finger. He slides the ring off and shoves it among the paper clips and dried-up pens in the cluttered depths of the desk drawer, then slams the drawer shut.

  Mexico. He recalls another of the curious fragments that he unearthed from Billie’s laptop. He pulls his laptop out of his bag and boots up the browser. He clicks to the website of Motel 6 and types Mexico locations into the directory and waits for the results, his heart flipping back and forth.

  There are no Motel 6 locations in Mexico. He stares at his browser, trying to figure out what to do next. So maybe his wife didn’t go on a secret scouting mission to Mexico that weekend, planning her tropical escape. But where else might she have gone?

  He hears the rattle of keys and gets up from his chair just as Olive comes through the front door. She peers around the door and then steps quickly into the room, scanning his face with her clear wide eyes. There is a smear of blue ink on the side of her nose, faint, like a thumbprint. He feels a stab of love for his daughter, so visceral, so alive and present. Without thinking about it, he folds her inside his arms and squeezes her tight, his eyes blurring. He realizes that he hasn’t hugged his daughter in far too long, and it’s not only because she isn’t coming to him for hugs anymore. It’s also been easier to simply forget what it feels like to have someone’s arms around him, especially someone who, day by day, more closely resembles his absent wife.

  Olive hugs him back wordlessly, her backpack slipping out of her hand and hitting the floor with a thump behind his feet. She clings tightly, as if to compensate for all the hugs—paternal, maternal—that she’s been missing over the last year. What’s the best thing for Olive? he wonders as he carefully disentangles himself. For her mom to be alive and have left us intentionally, or for her to be dead and gone forever? He needs to proceed carefully, he realizes. If he goes down this path, the odds are good that whatever he discovers—whatever dark-blind creatures are scuttling around underneath these rocks that he plans to overturn—isn’t going to be pleasant. What’s that going to do to his daughter? How will he protect her from the ugliness they might find?

  It can’t be helped. There’s no way he can stop now.

  OK, let’s do this, he thinks. Let’s go figure out if Billie is alive and what she was doing in the year before she disappeared.

  He steps back and examines Olive. “You’re coming from seeing Dr. Albright, right? How was it?”

  She bends to fiddle with her backpack. “I liked her,” she says, her face buried inside her bag. He can feel her disappearing into herself again, and he wants to drag her back. “She had a pretty good sense of humor.”

  “What’d you talk about? Am I allowed to ask?”

  “Mostly about Mom, you know, but also about school and stuff.” Olive still isn’t looking at him.

  “Did it clarify anything for you?” he asks, glancing at the bank statements lying in disarray on the floor, and the open laptop with the browser querying Motel 6 Mexico.

  She frowns. “About what?” she asks, following his gaze toward the mess on the floor and giving him a quizzical look.

  “About your mom…” he begins. But Olive isn’t looking at him anymore. Her face has gone pale, her pupils dark and wide; with one unsure hand she reaches out and clutches an armchair as if to hold herself upright. Her eyes scan left, then right, skimming past Jonathan as if something interesting is happening just behind him. Worried, Jonathan stoops to peer into her face. “Olive?”

  She doesn’t seem to register his presence in front of her. He grips her upper arms, unsure whether he should rouse her. It’s like the other evening in Olive’s bedroom, the way she rose from her desk with the same unfocused expression. He realizes now what that was all about. Oh, hell, he thinks. “Olive? Are you OK?”

  He feels a quiver pass through her, the muscles in her body making a series of tiny adjustments, and all at once she is back. She looks at him, her pupils glazed over, as she slowly releases her grip on the chair. “I’m fine, Dad.”

  He shuffles back through the same set of possibilities he’s been ruminating over the past two weeks—Is she having hallucinations? Or seizures? Or is it grief?—before he decides, somewhat reluctantly, to draw one last card. “Can you tell me about it?” he asks.

  She blinks at him, feigning innocence. “What do you mean?”

  “You just had another”—he stumbles over the word, not quite reconciled to it—“vision. Right?”

  She studies him as if searching for a sign that she’s stepping into a trap. “If I tell you, you’re going to send me back to the therapist.”

  “You don’t have to go to see the therapist again if you don’t want to,” he says.

  “Oh, good.” She stops, confused. “Wait—what? You believe me about the visions now?”

  Does he? She’s the one who set him on this road in the first place, he realizes. He thinks about something he wrote a few years earlier in a Decode story about dream research scientists: The mind is neither sensible nor scientific. As the quantum physicist Max Planck once wrote, “Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”

  He gives up, lets go. “I’m suspending disbelief,” he says. She’s looking at him, not understanding. “Look. I think it’s possible—possible—that your mom is alive. Enough that I’m willing to explore it with you.”

  He expects Olive to get excited, but she just offers him a wobbly smile and then, bit by bit, her face collapses. She sinks down on the couch and presses the heels of her hands into her eye sockets, breathing hard. Jonathan sits down next to her and puts a hand on her shoulder, feeling her body quivering. They sit there, at a loss for words, for a long time. “So—did you see something just now?” he asks.

  “Yes,” she says quietly. “I see weird stuff all the time, Dad. I see her. She talks to me. It feels like, I don’t know, telepathy or something.”

  “And you still believe that she’s alive.”

  “Yeah,” Olive says softly. “I know it doesn’t really make sense, Dad. But I just do. She needs me. I think she must be in trouble.”

  “OK.” He cocks his head and examines his daughter, trying to imagine what she must be seeing in her head, the ephemeral signals flickering through the dark. Is it comforting for her to see Billie again after all this time, to hear her voice? “The vision you just had right now—she was there?”

  “Yes. We were on”—she closes her eyes, thinking—“a farm?”

  “A farm?” Jonathan’s mind paints a picture of a cheerful red barn and a white picket fence, some moony cows and a clutch of freshly shorn lambs. “As in ‘Old MacDonald’?”

  “No.” She opens her eyes again. “Not the cliché. More like dust bowl. Failing.”

  The image in Jonathan’s mind clears, replaced by a different farm that he has seen far more recently. Almond trees, a lopsided chicken coop, a tire swing: a photograph currently sitting in a pile in the kitchen, waiting to be framed.

  He walks back over to his browser and clicks back to the Motel 6 web page, scanning the list of locations in California until he recognizes a name that rings a very faint bell. Schuster, California. He clicks on the address, and the mapping tool sends a red arrow down on a side street alongside a highway in the middle of the Central Valley of California. He scrolls right and left on the map, waiting for something to jog his memory. There. Roughly five miles to the east of Schuster, California, is the tiny hamlet of Meacham. The town where his wife lived until age seventeen, the town where her parents—as far as he knows—still live. He zooms out again until it’s abundantly clear:
The Motel 6 is the closest hotel to the town where Billie grew up.

  “What are you looking at?” Olive asks, peering over his shoulder. Her voice is steady again, growing animated. “Are you seriously saying that you believe me now? Because, Dad, this is great—I could really use your help. For a while I thought maybe there was this surfer down in Santa Cruz that was her, plus I found Mom’s name carved into a staircase down there, but that hasn’t panned out. Not yet, at least. Oh, and I have to tell you about this psychic I met today; she saw something—she wouldn’t tell me what. But she says Mom definitely wants to be found. I’m not sure how it all adds up, but maybe—amnesia? I’m thinking that, or…” She is babbling, but the words slide over Jonathan, who has clicked into a track that’s set him flying off in a new and very interesting direction.

  “What do you think,” he interrupts her, “of you and me going on a road trip tomorrow to meet your grandparents?”

  THE ROUTE TO OLIVE’S GRANDPARENTS’ HOUSE is lined with almond trees. They march precisely out toward the horizon, their branches reaching out for the sky, bereft of leaves, dormant. As Olive turns to watch them fly by, the individual trees dissolve into rhythmic noise. The ground beside the highway is brown and cracked; a sign attached to an abandoned trailer reads PRAY 4 RAIN.

  The drive from Berkeley to Meacham has taken four hours, and Olive’s father has spent most of that time peppering her with questions: How’s school? What are you thinking about college? Are you considering possible careers yet? Do you worry about the future? She bats his questions back haphazardly, too wired to really focus on the answers she’s giving. Still, she feels oddly happy: the sun through the windows warming the car, Coldplay on the radio, her dad nodding intently at everything she says as if it all matters.