Watch Me Disappear

by Janelle Brown

  Cheryl watches Olive approach their table and whispers under her breath, “She looks a little like her in the eyes.”

  Olive sidles up to them. “Hey, Dad.”

  “Why aren’t you in school?”

  She shrugs. “I felt lousy.”

  “You can’t just take off like that, Bean. Claremont has a no-tolerance policy for cutting. You’ll get yourself suspended.” It’s hard to be indignant when his daughter looks so miserable. She is pale and shaky, her uniform half untucked, straggling bits of hair falling loose from her hair clips. He wonders if she’s taken her Depakote yet but doesn’t want to ask her in front of Cheryl.

  “Can we not talk about it right now?” Olive is baldly staring at Cheryl, who sits there with the unlit electronic cigarette lodged between her fingers. “Um—hi?”

  “This is Cheryl—” Jonathan looks at Cheryl. “Sorry, what’s your last name?”

  “Lutz. I know, awful, right? But that’s what happens when you get married, you get their name, too, along with all their baggage.” She releases another of her braying laughs.

  Olive stares at Cheryl, her eyes widening slightly. She seems to be on satellite delay.

  “So, look, Olive, we’ll talk back at home—” he begins, but Cheryl is already talking over him.

  “I knew your mom back in high school.”

  “Really?” Olive perks up. She grabs a chair and sits down. Her backpack lands at her feet with a thump. “OK if I join?”

  “We’re pretty much done,” Jonathan says, turning to Cheryl. “Aren’t we?”

  But Cheryl is rummaging around in her purse, her eyes trained on Olive’s face. “Your mother, she was really something. I still think about her all the time.” She extricates a folded piece of paper and slides it over to Jonathan. “I thought maybe you’d want to see this.”

  It’s a note, written on smudged binder paper that’s faded almost to yellow with age, its creases soft and worn. He unfolds it carefully, and instantly recognizes his wife’s spiky handwriting.

  Cheryl

  People in this town want me to be small. They want to squeeze me into the tiny box of their expectations even if it kills me in the process. Anyway, I’m not going to let that happen anymore, so I’m off. Everything about this place is stagnant.

  I know you want me to tell you where I’m going, but honestly, I don’t think I can trust you. Not after what you did. Just know that I’m going to a place where people think a lot bigger. There’s a whole world of people out there, people like Sidney, who see the big picture and know that their lives are good for more than sitting around eating Doritos and talking about who’s the hottest Bon Jovi.

  So, listen: The earth as we know it is teetering on the brink. It’s going to collapse, sooner than we think. We’re draining her dry, leaving nothing behind, and pretty soon we are going to be facing massive shortages of resources, and then the cataclysms are going to happen—the global warming and the depletion of the forests—and then everything is going to go to hell. Like nothing you could imagine. So yeah, Sidney and I are going to do something about that.

  I’d say I’ll see you again soon but I’d probably be lying. Don’t worry, I don’t hate you. But buck up, OK? I’m sure you’ll be fine. Lips zipped, chin up, don’t look back.

  Sybilla

  He looks up, snagging on that name again. “You knew Sidney?” he asks.

  Cheryl nods. “That’s the guy she met at the party in L.A. Honestly, he kind of creeped me out, he was all intense and, like, fixated on Sybilla. Loved to hear himself talk, you know? Thought he was soooo radical, save the world, all that crap. Hippie punk shit.” She makes a face. “Of course, Sybilla soaked that up. I didn’t realize they’d kept in touch until I found her letter. She’d stuck it in my math textbook and I didn’t find it for a month.”

  Jonathan absorbs this uneasily, thinking of the Polaroid, still wondering. He glances over at Olive. She is staring at the letter in a way that makes him uncomfortable. He feels oddly queasy about the teenager who wrote those words: He used to feel protective of that girl, a victim of untenable circumstances, but now he isn’t entirely sure that she was the victim she made herself out to be.

  Cheryl is standing up, balling her belongings under her arm as if she’s about to make a dash for the door. “Gotta run,” she says. She leans over and tugs the letter away from Olive, folding it back to a rectangle. “Kids will be home from school soon.”

  He thinks quickly, running through the questions piling up in his mind, settling on the one that seems most critical. “One last question,” he says. “Did Billie ever come back? To Meacham?”

  Cheryl already has the electronic cigarette pressed between her lips in anticipation of flight. It dangles there as she mulls over his question. “I’m not totally sure,” she says finally. “I heard a rumor, maybe five years later? That she was back. I even went to her house a few times to ring the doorbell, but no one ever answered. So.” She edges toward the exit. “Look—I’m sorry, but—I gotta…”

  He stands. “Thanks for coming.”

  He watches her leave. The sideways afternoon light through the windows illuminates her face: the way her skin sags under her eyes, the limp straw hair stuck in the coral gloss of her lips, but despite all that, something earnest and hopeful in her eyes. Billie’s words echo across the decades: I’m sure you’ll be fine. This woman, she’s really trying. He wonders what she’s trying to prove and whether she’s doing it for a ghost.

  “Dad,” Olive says softly. “Sidney’s the guy who’s in jail, right? The drug dealer?”

  “Was in jail. He’s not anymore. He came to your mom’s memorial.”

  She sits straight up in her chair, looking past him at some point in the distance. “What if Sidney kidnapped Mom?”

  He is struck momentarily dumb: This is a scenario he didn’t consider. Finally, he laughs, a little uneasily. “That’s ridiculous,” he says. “Why would he do that?”

  “You heard Cheryl. He was obsessed with her,” Olive says, her voice pitching high and hot. “It makes sense, doesn’t it? He’s a criminal, he came after her! God, Dad, it would explain everything! I told you she was in trouble.”

  “Slow down, Olive, you’re getting way ahead of yourself.”

  “We have to find him!”

  “I don’t even know his last name,” he says.

  “Then invite Harmony over for dinner tonight and ask her,” she says, crossing her arms. “I bet she knows.”

  —

  That night, after dinner has been cleared and the dishes piled up in the sink where they will be ignored for the next few days, Jonathan turns to Harmony. She sprawls next to him on the living room couch, reading a book. Olive is upstairs, safely ensconced in her room, where she fled the minute dinner was finished; still, just to be safe, Jonathan has positioned himself on the opposite end of the couch from Harmony. Close enough to register the heat of her, far enough away to stay out of trouble.

  He notices that Harmony is reading Billie’s old Tana French novel, apparently retrieved from the corner of his bedroom where he flung it two weeks earlier. When did she find that? The bookmark has been moved back to page one. He tries not to let this bother him. The tangle of their relationship—his dead wife, Harmony’s ex-boyfriend—gives the whole scenario a weird undercurrent that he isn’t sure how to process.

  “Sidney,” he says to her. “You knew him, right?”

  “Sidney? Billie’s old boyfriend?” She flips a page, her index finger tracing its way along the words. “Yeah, I knew him. He was kind of a mess. Had a drug problem.”

  “He got arrested for dealing, right?”

  She looks up from the novel, considers a point on the opposite wall. “Among other things. I was gone by then.”

  “Is he…dangerous?”

  She turns to stare at him, her brow wrinkling in a distractingly appealing way. “What? That’s a weird question. Why are you asking that?”

  He thinks quickly. �
�I was just remembering that I saw him at Billie’s memorial last year. I didn’t really talk to him, but I was curious. He gave off a vibe.”

  Harmony drops the book and stretches out toward him, questing with a toe until it makes contact with his shin, moving it slowly up the inside of his leg. “I’m sure that’s what all those years in jail will do to you.”

  “What was his relationship with Billie like?”

  The toe hesitates precariously near his crotch. “It was kind of a love/hate thing. Intense. She sure didn’t love his drug problems. They fought a lot about that.”

  What part should he be more concerned about? The love part or the hate? “Do you know where he lives now?”

  “Why would I know that?” She laughs. The foot makes contact with his groin. “It was a pretty nomadic scene back then. People came and went a lot; got arrested, moved off to the woods, ended up on the street, died of drug overdoses. No one really kept tabs. We’ve all gone our own ways since then. I mean, he could be anywhere.”

  Jonathan thinks of the burned letter; Sidney’s fleeting presence at Billie’s memorial. Not anywhere, he thinks. Somewhere around here. “Well, what’s his last name? I was thinking I’d look him up.”

  She slides closer and slips a hand between the buttons of his shirt, tugging gently at the hair there, sending electric shocks across his torso. “No clue,” she says. “Everyone had nicknames back then; no one even liked to use their real first names, much less last ones. They were all about ‘reject the patriarchal authority,’ ‘anarchy not hierarchy.’ Anonymity was big. Remember? Sparrow? Sidney went by Maverick. A much better name for a radical than Sidney, don’tcha think?”

  He’s distracted by her hand on his chest. “And who were you?” he asks.

  She laughs as she straddles his lap. “Harmony,” she whispers. “I’ve always been Harmony.”

  There’s a small mewling sound, and they look up to see Olive standing in the doorway, watching them. They quickly disentangle themselves, but it’s too late.

  “Well, that explains a lot,” Olive says flatly.

  She turns and bolts back up the stairs. They can hear her bare feet slapping across the wooden floors upstairs, and then the slam of the door to her room.

  Harmony looks at Jonathan. Her eyes are dilated and dazed, her mouth slightly agape. She slaps a palm across it, suppressing whatever words are trying to come out.

  “Shit.” Jonathan pushes himself off the couch and dashes after Olive. By the time he gets to her door, breathing heavily, she’s already locked it. Through the crack, he can see her shadow, just on the other side of the door.

  He knocks quietly. “Go away,” she calls out.

  “I’m not going away,” he says. He waits a minute and knocks again, harder. “I can do this all night.”

  He hears her exasperated groan through the door—“God. Fine”—and then the door swings open, revealing Olive, her face red with self-righteous fury.

  He pushes into the room and sits down on the desk chair, kicking aside a pile of books and a filthy-looking towel. Olive remains standing, her arms hanging limply by her sides. Next to him, on her desk, her laptop is open to Google; the search field reads, heartbreakingly, Sidney Oregon Drug Dealer. There are 2,770,000 results.

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I know that what you just saw probably feels like a, a—”

  “Betrayal?”

  He winces. “Olive. Look. We were already heading into treacherous waters, with the one-year anniversary coming up. And now with all this—speculation—about your mom, and the things you’ve been seeing…I’m sure it’s confusing for you, because it’s confusing to me. Who knows what any of it really means? There’s a lot of big emotions at play here right now. Meanwhile, Harmony, she’s been a real comfort to me, and it’s natural that I would want to feel—something—again—”

  She cuts him off. “When we find Mom, how’s she going to feel about you hooking up with Harmony?”

  How would she feel? He swallows. “I can’t live my life based on speculation. Your mom’s not here.” His voice is sharp, his jaw working up and down.

  “Not yet.”

  He throws up his hands. “What do you want me to say? That I’m going to sit here like a monk forever, just in case?”

  She lifts her square chin stubbornly. “No. I want you to say that you’re going to find Sidney.”

  The laptop next to him glows bright in the dim light of her room. It draws his eyes back to it like a beacon. The top Google search result is a recent news story out of Florida: “Mexican Mafia Tied to Car Lot Drug Bust.” He can see that she’s already clicked through the top seven links, and he understands that his daughter intends to sit here all night, methodically poring over every one of those useless pages. It’s painful to imagine.

  He gently closes the lid of her laptop, putting the search engine to sleep. “OK,” he says. “I will.”

  OLIVE WAKES UP IN THE DARK with a start, her heart pounding. She lies there as the panic subsides, settling into a familiar sensation—the feeling of the dreams still clinging to the edges of her mind. At first she can’t pin down what’s wrong, just that something has changed in the night. An absence. It’s like that memory game you play as a kid: a tray full of objects and you have to close your eyes and open them again and determine which object was removed; and you stare and stare at the tray, an invisible void nagging at you, until the answer hits you.

  Mom is gone.

  The Depakote has kicked in. Olive lies motionless in bed, taking inventory of the drug’s side effects. Weak, slightly queasy, an odd metallic taste in her mouth: check. She feels like a dull pencil. She tests herself, reaching out with her mind for the reassuring presence of her mother buzzing imperceptibly around the periphery of her consciousness, but Billie has disappeared. Almost like she was never there; which maybe she never was. Maybe the visions were all a matter of misfiring neurons, a bruise on the brain and a bad case of nostalgia, the search for her mother just a wild-goose chase.

  She lets herself cry a little bit.

  Time passes, she’s not sure if it’s been minutes or hours; she’s exhausted, but she can’t make herself fall back to sleep. She lies there trying to make her mother materialize again—trying to picture her—but the image in her head already feels like it’s fading, like a photograph left too long in the sun.

  Eventually the morning chases the night away, a thin sunrise leaking gray under the curtains. She can hear the murmur of voices downstairs—Harmony is here. Did she sleep over last night? Or did she come back this morning? Both unappealing scenarios.

  After a while she smells breakfast cooking—eggs and hash browns. Her father never bothers cooking on weekday mornings, which means that either Harmony has taken over in the kitchen or her father is showing off. In the cage above her desk, Gizmo burbles happily, rings her bell, waits for Olive to get up and feed her.

  She pulls the covers over her head, and when her father knocks on her door, murmuring her name, she doesn’t respond. She can hear him come into her room and pick his way across the minefield of discarded laundry on her floor; and then she feels the weight of his body depressing the edge of her mattress.

  “Who are you hiding from?” he asks.

  “I’m not hiding,” she says from under the covers.

  He gives her foot a little squeeze. “Why don’t I believe you?” Then, his voice pleading: “Olive, please. Talk to me, Bean.”

  “I feel sick,” she says into her pillow.

  “What variety of sick are we talking about? Sick like the flu? Pinkeye? Or do you mean side effects from the Depakote?” He peels back the covers to expose her face, and she blinks unhappily in the light. Despite her father’s expression of concern, he seems distressingly lively this morning, as if he’s already polished off a pot of coffee. His cheeks are flushed; he’s shaved. She notices that he’s holding a cup of water.

  “It’s the Depakote, I think,” she says. “It’s making me feel weird. Like, gr
oggy. Queasy.”

  He looks down at his feet and fishes the Depakote pill bottle off the floor, where she dropped it last night. “Dr. Fishbein said to expect that.” He turns the container slowly in his hand. “We’ll see where you’re at after the weekend and give him a call if you’re not feeling better. Until then—” He tips a pill into his hand and hands it to her, along with the glass of water.

  “Come on, Dad. I’m perfectly capable of taking my own pills.” She swallows it down, staring at him balefully over the rim of the water glass. “Why does everyone treat me like a child?”

  “Sorry,” he says, but he doesn’t sound particularly sorry at all. “If you’re feeling that bad, you shouldn’t go to school today. I’ll call the front office.”

  “Thanks.” She rolls over and picks at the peeling tape on one of the photographs above her bed, a snapshot of her and Mom making an igloo up at Lake Tahoe, back when she was just a kid. She still remembers that igloo: They spent all day building it, her mom insisting that it had to really work, and when they were done, they built a fire inside it and roasted marshmallows and drank hot apple cider. It was magical, as if they were picnicking on the moon, even though she was sore and her snowsuit was soaked from spending the whole day digging in the snow. Her mom wanted to camp out in it that night, too, but her dad argued that Olive was going to catch pneumonia if she didn’t get inside to warm up. “Party pooper,” her mom teased him, although Olive felt vaguely relieved that she didn’t have to sleep in the snow.

  “I have to go into the city today, but I’ll have Harmony stay here in case you need anything,” her father says.

  “Dad. Did you not hear what I just said about treating me like a child? I don’t need anything. Especially not her.” She stares at him accusingly.

  Her father sighs. “Call me if it gets any worse.”

  “I will.” Olive pulls the sheet back over her head.

  “I love you,” he says. She hears him leave the room, but she stays under the covers in the dark until, her head swimming, she falls back asleep.