If I Disappear

by Eliza Jane Brazier

  “I guess I didn’t know her that well.” He waits.

  “Did you see Tasia’s reaction? When we first told her about the list? Did you see how shocked she looked? That didn’t look like the face of someone thinking about something that happened fifteen years ago. I think she’s lying. I think there’s more to the story. It was almost like she expected us. Like she was afraid. Like there was a real and present threat.” I can feel my heart lift, the beginnings of getting carried away.

  “I don’t know.” Jed climbs onto his bike and waits for me.

  “Well, I do. I know Rachel.” And I do. I know you better than anybody else. And I’m not going to give up on you. “We need to keep digging. We need to talk to Clementine. Doesn’t she live in Happy Camp?”

  “I’ve never been to her place. Have you?”

  “You could ask Tasia,” I say, but the lights are out. The door is locked. The town is deserted, in the way of small towns on a Sunday night.

  Jed is limp, like he is worn-out already, like he doesn’t want to find you. Like he doesn’t care. “Maybe we should just call it a night.”

  “Fine, but we’re not finished yet. We’re just getting started.” I force the helmet over my head, ignoring the swirling sensation in my gut. You wouldn’t give up. You never gave up, no matter how cold the case seemed to be.

  * * *

  —

  As we move out onto the highway, the space between my hip bones swirls. I hate this road, especially on a motorcycle, especially in the dark, where I can’t see the curves in the road until they take us, slanting sideways. The air is cold and it slips under my shirt, under my skin.

  We are sliding through a turn when a black truck appears behind us, its lights fully bright. The driver lands on his horn, as if we don’t know he’s there, and the sound ricochets from ridge to ridge, so it seems to amplify, open up my eardrums.

  I move closer to Jed, to ask him what the hell this guy is thinking, but of course he doesn’t hear me. I lean forward and the wind whips my cheeks and the truck presses behind us so close, I swear I can feel the heat of its metal grille, the smoke of its exhaust. And it rides even closer, the driver jamming the horn down again, swallowing us in the sound.

  Jed goes rigid as the bike starts to skid. He turns to look behind us and I turn with him, but all I can see are two bright white lights, a tall black chamber; then the grille is so close that I swear it’s underneath us. The bike twists and we bounce off the road, toward the edge of a cliff.

  “Get the fuck out of this town!”

  Episode 41:

  Murder of a Jane Doe 1

  **Graphic Content Warning**

  She had been stabbed eighty-six times. The skin of her cheeks had been clawed from her face, down to the bone in places. The murderer bleached her fingernails, then gave her a manicure. They used a curling iron to style her hair, and left a postmortem burn on her forehead.

  The women who found her said, “At first, I thought she was a doll, as silly as that sounds. My mind just couldn’t comprehend. I thought she was an enormous doll.”

  The bike spins, flattening through the dirt. Jed drops his boot, drags his leg to pinwheel us to a stop.

  I force myself away, wanting to get as far from the hot, clicking metal as I can. My knees shake, in delayed reaction, and I trip, falling awkwardly against a rock. Jed lifts his helmet and pitches it at the two little red lights glaring backward at us from the highway. They slip and disappear behind a curve, and the sound of the engine cuts out quickly. Everything is quiet.

  “Fucking asshole!” Jed yells. “The goddamn, fucking assholes in this fucking place!” He rolls up his jeans, and I can see his leg is torn up, road rash where he slid to stop the bike. He sits down hard on a rock. “What the fuck is wrong with people?” He presses his finger to the wound and hisses. “Shit.”

  My heart starts to race, swelling in my chest. “Do you think that was them?”

  “Who?” he says, hissing again.

  “The gang!” I blurt. My voice takes a slightly hysterical edge, and I try to quell it, but we were just run off the road. “The people Rachel talked about! The ones who ran her off the road.”

  He raises a skeptical brow at me. I can tell he is not impressed by my apparent gleefulness. “I think it was an asshole—that’s what I think.”

  “Maybe they know we were talking to Tasia, and the police—maybe they don’t like it!” I try to keep the victory from my voice, but I can’t help being a little proud. Maybe this is a sign that we’re on the right track. Maybe this is a warning that we’re getting closer to you.

  He sets his leg down. “What do you mean, the police?”

  “I talked to them this morning.” He shakes his head like I did something bad. “They weren’t helpful, if that makes you feel better. Officer Hardy. He told me to get as far away from the Bards as I could.”

  “Ha.” Jed snorts. “That sounds pretty helpful to me.” His knee jerks as he starts to stand, so he rocks back down. “Hey, will you give me a hand here?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine; I just can’t stand up.” I take his hand and guide him to his feet. He hovers beside me for a moment, hand on my shoulder, testing his leg.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I told you I was fine,” he says, and then he squeezes my shoulder once so I feel it melt down through me and he steps back, away. “That bike”—he points—“is not fine.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean”—he puts his hands on his hips—“I hope you’re wearing comfortable shoes.” My heart rate jumps again. “You can leave the helmet here. I’ll come pick this thing up once we get back.” Jed starts up the highway, testy on his bad leg.

  “What about Addy?” I’m not quite sure what I mean. She is not here and she has nothing to do with this situation, but still I can’t help but consider her first, like she holds a primary spot in my brain.

  “We don’t have a whole lotta options. We can’t call anyone without a signal. We could go back to Happy Camp and knock on doors, try to borrow a phone, but I don’t reckon you want to call up Addy for a ride neither.”

  “How far is it?”

  “I reckon it’ll take us about an hour, if we’re quick.”

  “What if that truck comes back?”

  He glares at me. “Sera, it was just a truck. People out here are like that. They come out here because they don’t like other people, and sometimes it shows.”

  I follow behind him, wading in the light from his phone. “Is that why you came out here?”

  “I told you why I came out here: I wanted a better life.”

  “Then why did you stay when your wife left?” He bristles. I have gone too far. What was I thinking, saying that to him? But it’s like I can’t stop pushing; I can’t stop looking for answers. His wife only lasted a week. It was six months before he even tried to see her. You vanished and no one is looking for you. If this place had another name, it would be Apathy. Apathy County, locked on the Murder Line, in the dead center of Nowhere, USA. “I just mean, I would think you would have gone after her,” I say before I realize I’m not making things better. I have this insatiable need to know people’s dirty secrets. I need to understand everything, while everyone else can live with things never being resolved or explained.

  “Well, this is nice.” Jed slaps his good leg. “I ride you all the way out here even though I think this whole idea that something happened to Rachel is downright crazy. We get into a goddamn accident, fuck up my bike and my leg and now what? You gonna tell me I’m a bad husband? I let my wife and my life slip away. You think I don’t know that?”

  “I don’t mean . . . I let my life slip away too.”

  “All right.” He throws his hands up. “Don’t go looking for your answers in me. Come to that, don’t you go looking for your answer
s in Rachel neither. You know that’s what all this is about, right? I don’t even know if I reckon you care whether something happened to her—you’d rather just get caught up in someone else’s disappearance instead of dealing with your own.”

  I am quiet. I don’t think he’s wrong, but I hate to admit it. Maybe I did want to get lost in you. Maybe I wanted to disappear in your story.

  We walk along the highway and for once my mind is quiet. There is no podcast playing on my phone, no crazy thoughts, no useless anxiety, just the cold and the mountains and the trees and the rivers and the knowledge that I messed up.

  * * *

  —

  If I had to define the exact moment, the day I started to disappear, I think I could. It was the day the divorce became official, the day there was no going back, when I decided to be a woman, alone. But that’s not true. Because my ex would argue that for most of our marriage, I was already gone. So maybe it was the day I lost the baby. But that’s not true either. I think of the wedding, how it just went on and on. And everyone was so happy, and I was just there. And the happier they were, the more there I was. I go further back, to the day we met. I knew we would get married right away. I knew it like it had been chosen for me. I said to myself, Here is a man I can stand. Here is someone I can definitely put up with. So maybe it was before that. And I think of being young, how women are taught, piece by piece, how they fit into the world. But that’s not where it started either. I was born a woman. I was born to disappear.

  I want to tell Jed he’s wrong, that he doesn’t understand how deep this thing goes. But I also want to demand that he marry me, that he save me from this. Take this man or any man you can get your hands on. Maybe that is your wish for me. Maybe that’s the solution, the only way I can stop myself from disappearing.

  * * *

  —

  The next week rocks me back into your world without you: riding horses, cleaning windows, riding horses, cleaning windows. Every day at five o’clock, I go back to my cabin, force down a peanut butter sandwich and fall asleep. My body aches but it’s oddly pleasant, and I think, Maybe I should give up. Maybe I should let go. Maybe I need to accept that you can’t find someone who was born to be gone. But every night, I still switch on your podcast. I still fall asleep to the sound of your voice.

  Episode 64: They told her she was crazy to think anything nefarious had occurred.

  Episode 18: They looked the other way.

  Episode 37: The case went cold.

  All the missing women, and the story ends the same way. The story ends when people stop looking, when they stop searching, when no more evidence is found. I won’t let your story end that way. I won’t let my story end that way. I won’t give up. I won’t stop looking. If Jed is right, if I’m looking for you because I’m lost too, then finding you will save you and me both.

  I still have my list of names. I still have Clementine. I think of what she said about you, that you were friends when you were young, when everyone was friends. Tasia said that same thing, and I think how alike we are in our aloneness. I think that no one would look for me if I disappeared. But then I think you might.

  I make a plan. I will offer to speak to Clementine’s class. And I will make her tell me everything about you to return the favor. I rub the windows like I can force everything to be clear.

  A couple times a day, your mother checks in on me. She admires my work ethic, my dedication, the fire in my belly.

  “You’re a hard worker,” she says. “I like that.”

  She tells me stories of the latest disasters—the PC culture is destroying this country; all those shootings are a government conspiracy to get her to give up her guns; the people that own the land across the way are growing cannabis and they want to get her out—and all the potions she has conjured to solve them: thoughts and prayers, lavender to sleep, calendula around the perimeter to overpower the stench of cannabis. Then she sighs and says, “We’re so happy you’re here.” Over and over.

  One night she invites me to dinner at the main house. “We’re going to have everyone over. All the staff.” I assume she means me and Jed. “We’ll eat out on the patio.”

  “Do you want me to bring anything?” I ask although the concept is ridiculous. What could I bring? I’m not supposed to leave.

  “Just yourself.” She flashes a smile that flushes hot youth through her face, and then she leaves me to my windows, to the meticulous, solitary, bone-crushing work of making glass disappear.

  I think about you almost all the time, often in an exhausted, abstract way, but other times I examine Tasia’s words for clues. She seemed so angry at you—why? Because you let yourself be affected by a girl’s disappearance? She seemed angry and afraid, and she didn’t like you? What was she afraid of? And what did you argue about the day Florence disappeared?

  After work, I lie down for a moment and fall asleep. Heated dreams swirl through my head, and I hear your voice, hear your angry voice like it’s right outside.

  I get out of bed, still off-balance. I put on one of the shirts your mother gave me, a bright orange flannel with daisies embroidered in a chain around my neck. I walk across the ranch as the sun lowers, throwing dapples through the trees.

  As I pass by the garden, I notice a brown patch where the blackberry bushes have died. Was that there before? I step closer, timidity infecting my limbs. The thorny bushes have gone a pale beige color, shriveled and receded, revealing what lies beneath. I step forward. I tip the thorny bush with the toe of my shoe, and that’s when I see it, the shape of a tiny pale hand, fingers outstretched.

  My heart throbs in my chest. My neck breaks a sweat, like I’ve been found guilty. I swivel my eyes around the ranch, feeling watched.

  “There’s something here,” I say out loud, even if no one is listening.

  It’s a baby. There is a baby in the bushes.

  * * *

  —

  I crouch down on my knees. I feel sick and then I think—Don’t leave your DNA! I cover my hand with my shirt and peel back the blackberry bushes so I can see the body, laid out in the shadows.

  It’s a doll. It’s a doll, and somewhere I knew that. But I remember so many episodes where real dead bodies were described: I thought it was a mannequin. I thought the blood was spilled red wine.

  I know that I should leave it, but I use my sleeve-covered hand to drag it out. The displacement in the bushes releases a rich, rotting smell that pushes me back. The doll falls on my lap. There are puncture wounds in her chest and scratch marks on her cheek. I am reminded of Murder of a Jane Doe 1, like I have found the body you told me about. And for a moment it is as if that story is not just real, but here with me. Like everything you told me was not only true, but also tied to this ranch, to you, to me.

  We had a nursery; that was the worst thing. We had a nursery with yellow walls like the walls of your yellow house. I tried to move the furniture so many times. I tried to redecorate, make it an office that no one worked in or a guest room that no one slept in. But really it was just an empty room, yellow and empty, like your house.

  And I’m sitting alone in the dirt, holding a doll. Who is the crazy woman? Who is the one losing her mind?

  * * *

  —

  I hear the sound of a party before I arrive, and I think I must be imagining it. Your mother hates everyone. Who would she invite? I left the doll propped up at the side of the greenhouse. I felt bad leaving it, but I also didn’t particularly want to take it home with me.

  When I arrive at the house, I see another big black truck parked outside. Does everyone in this town drive a truck? I find a group of people weaving in and out the back door under your mother’s command. I don’t see Jed. Instead I see the two women from church, parked in patio chairs with their bare legs crossed, jawing to each other as gnats swirl overhead. Your two nieces, dressed in long skirts, carry plates and
cups in prairie patterns. They look up fast when they see me, then look away. Your brother is here.

  I walk into the house to see if I can help. Plates of organic food steam on the counter—the food is brighter than the plates and smells like earth and nettles. Beside it, your mother is seething already.

  “Can I help with anything?”

  She flaps a dish towel. “Is Jed here yet?”

  “I haven’t seen him.”

  Your brother is helping your father use the computer in the corner.

  “You don’t need to type in your password,” he says. “It’s already saved.”

  “I don’t want it to be saved.” Your father makes a grab for the mouse.

  “They’re all saved because you keep forgetting them.”

  “No! How do you unsave them?”

  “Dad, come on. I can’t keep resetting them for you. Trust me, no one wants to log into your Prime account.”

  “That’s how they get you!” He taps the side of the computer. “Next thing you know, it’s tickets to Aruba on your dollar!”

  “Please stop talking, Dad.”

  Your mother told me they didn’t have Wi-Fi. Obviously, she doesn’t want me to use it. I wonder if you used it. I can’t imagine you broadcasting from here, in the middle of your parents’ living room, but I still want to search their computer.

  “You have Internet,” I say to your mother.

  “It’s for business use only,” she snaps. “We don’t like you kids going on there and messing things up.”

  “But if I—”

  “Emmett, Homer!” Your mother flaps the towel again, shooing away the heat. “We need to start dinner. Where’s Jed?”