If I Disappear

by Eliza Jane Brazier

  I hesitate, realizing we will be up there alone. I can say no. I can refuse to go. But then I think of you. You weren’t afraid to put yourself at risk. You weren’t afraid of being “crazy.” You weren’t afraid of pushing, when everyone else let go.

  I can drop out. I can quit, like I quit everything. Or I can be fearless. I can be the person you assumed I was, in every episode, whispered in my ear. Told me grim secrets because you knew I could handle it, that I wasn’t like other people. You believed in me. You knew I would save you, if you ever needed to be saved.

  “I’ll be okay.” I step in to finish tacking up my horse. It’s quiet for a few minutes, except for the flap of tack and the huff of our breath, the occasional nicker of our horses. And then we mount and ride out past your mother’s house, along switchbacks up the steep mountain, deep and deeper into the woods.

  Too soon, we are so far up that the ranch appears like a cluster in the palm of the mountains. I take a breath. Jed glances back and gives me a knowing look.

  “I sometimes don’t realize how close we all are down there,” I say.

  “I do,” he says, flicking his reins to stop his horse trying to grab at the plants along the trail.

  “So, how’s Grace?” The question activates a rod in his spine. I can’t see his face to gauge his expression, but his body tells me he is not happy with the question.

  “I’m sure she’s all right,” he says stiffly, like I should know better than to ask.

  “In Texas?”

  “I reckon.” His voice is light but then he pulls up his horse. He looks down at the ranch below us, and I can see there are tears forming in his eyes.

  My first impulse is to say, “Sorry.”

  “S’okay.” He wipes an eye. “Need to stop having whiskey for breakfast.”

  “You didn’t see her at all when you went back?”

  “No. I told you she wouldn’t see me.” He wipes an eye again, although the tears have gone.

  “But why wouldn’t she, if you came all the way down there?”

  “Sera, this might shock you, but I have a little bit of a drinking problem.”

  “I thought you were just a cowboy.”

  “That too.” He sighs. “If I thought I deserved to see her, I would.” He flicks the reins and urges his horse forward.

  “So you don’t even try?”

  He stops again. I can see him swallow. “Now, I don’t go telling this to everyone, but I reckon you might understand. I haven’t exactly been honest about what brought me here. I . . . I guess I’ve been hard on you because I can relate a little too much.” He sighs again, all through his body, but instead of making him look defeated, it makes him look stronger. “Back in Abilene, I got into a real hole. I stopped working, just fell to drinking. I hid it from my wife, did all kinds of things, just trying to hide from her, all lyin’ and cheatin’ and stealin’. I got a real sick kick for any bad thing.” He shakes his head. “God love that woman. I don’t know how I ever thought I could live the life we’re supposed to live, with a wife and kids and a job. I guess I knew I couldn’t, but my mistake was, I done it anyway. It just acted like a vise on me. I couldn’t do it. I just can’t.” He pleads like he knows I will understand, and I do. That’s why I’m here.

  “Coming out here,” he continues, “it was kind of like a last-chance saloon, you know? One last chance to start over, make it all work right. I promised Grace I’d cut out the bad stuff, swore up and down and on my life. But I didn’t. I didn’t stop at all, and when I came home drunk, just one week after we come, away from her family, away from everything she ever knew, she was done. She got far away from me, just like she shoulda done. So if I don’t follow her, if I don’t look for her, it’s because I don’t want her looking for me. I want better than that for her.”

  I nod, but my voice twitches when I say, “Okay.”

  He tilts his head, like he knows me too well. “What?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “I can see you got something crazy in your head; you might as well just say it.”

  I think of the Buck Knife in my pocket, the gun at his hip, consider how everything could change suddenly, if he is the killer. But somehow, I know he’s not. “It’s embarrassing.” He groans, encouraging me. “Last night, I was walking out by the lake where the pet cemetery is. I saw these headstones and I thought—I thought one had your wife’s name on it.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I’m sorry.” I squeeze the reins. This is not how I saw this playing out.

  “You think I murdered my wife?”

  “I didn’t—”

  “You think I’m a murderer, and you rode all the way up out here, to the middle of nowhere, alone with me, and I’m armed, and you ain’t.” He brushes his gun. “So you could ask me about it?” His hand is shaking slightly, and I wonder if that’s from the alcohol or something else.

  He’s right. I can’t seem to stop myself from telling him everything, when I should be treading carefully. And I wonder if it’s really because I trust him or if it’s because I need him to like me, even if he is a murderer.

  “I didn’t say that I thought you did it,” I say, although he was my primary suspect. You always taught me, family first.

  “Lord Almighty, you have a death wish!” I am quiet. He doesn’t kill me. He doesn’t try to. Does that mean I was right to trust him? He still hasn’t offered an explanation and at length he continues. “You seen the cats?”

  I think of the cat I found by the lake last night, and Bumby, and the sea of cats in the chicken coop. “Yes.”

  He sniffs. “When Grace was here, she used to try and look after all them cats. Addy told her not to, but that was just Grace’s way. She loved animals. Would just stand for an hour petting a horse or something. Anyway, she found some kittens in there—of course she did; there’s about a dozen at any given time—and one of ’em was sick.” He tugs nervously on the reins. “So Grace took it. Drove out to the vet in Yreka and they offered to rescue it, to take care of it, for free and all. But Addy found out somehow. And she tracked Grace down and accused her of stealing her property. She demanded she bring the kitten back. And Grace did, though it broke her heart.

  “The kitten died the next day. And Addy made this big production, about how they’d bury it up there in Grace’s honor.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “I know. I was working that day. It was just Grace on her own. I didn’t know anything about it until Rachel told me. She really lit into me, all how I’d dragged Grace out here and abandoned her. I’m not saying she was wrong, but I do have to think Addy was a little to blame.” He shakes his head and clucks his tongue, remembering. He tightens his grip on the reins. “Grace had a real bad feeling about this place. She was real religious—I met her at church and all. She was the good girl from the bad family; I was the boy she shoulda stayed away from. You know the story. I never saw her pray more than she did that week she was up here.”

  “You left the kitten flowers.” It’s sweet.

  “She woulda wanted me to.” He flips his reins. “I’m not all bad, you know. I do have the occasional decent impulse.”

  I nod, gazing down into the pit of the valley.

  He catches my eye. “You satisfied?” And then I have a glimpse, like a whistle all through me, that this is a lie, that this is a conspiracy and they are all part of it. I see Addy and Jed, last night’s entire dinner party, out in the woods after nightfall with a fire lit, blood painted on their faces and a ritual killing on the menu. Episode 45 of your podcast, The Queen of the Flies, about the cult that lived off the grid in the woods, and every year at the height of summer, they feasted on the flesh of an outsider. Missing, Murder, Conspiracy.

  I know it’s crazy, but I also know it’s true. It happened. So how do I know it’s not happening now?

  “I won’t be
satisfied until I find Rachel.”

  He blows air out of his cheeks. “Darlin’, it must be hard being you.” He reins his horse around and continues up the steep trail. And I have a choice: I can keep trusting him or I can let myself go off the deep end. But the truth is, there isn’t a place isolated enough to escape the fact that you have to trust someone, sometimes. There’s no way around it and I urge my horse. I follow him up the hill.

  The horses pick their way through, over fallen branches and poison ivy.

  “I talked to Clementine last night,” I say. “Tried.”

  “What’d she say?”

  “She said, ‘Not here.’ And then Homer appeared. It’s like she didn’t want to say anything in front of him.”

  “Homer’s a good guy.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “He just is,” he says, voice rising in annoyance.

  “Everyone’s a suspect.”

  “You don’t have a crime.”

  “Why did he leave? Why did Homer leave the ranch? He’s this great family man. They built a house for him—why isn’t he here?”

  “I reckon I can guess.”

  “Why?”

  “ ’Cause no one can take Addy for too long. She’s too controlling, gets under your skin. That’s why they take bets out in town on how long people will last. You and I are defying the odds. Why do you think Addy is ‘so happy you’re here’? ’Cause she can’t believe you’re crazy enough to stay.” He shakes his head. “He probably couldn’t take it, so he left. You can imagine, it’s not easy to find a job out here. This is about the only place that pays in money. Eventually he found Jesus; that’s how bad things got. And then he got a job at the lumberyards with the Moronis.”

  “I’m surprised they come for dinner.”

  “You and me both.”

  The trees drop away on the right. We are high up in the mountains and we can see the sweep, the rise and fall of the peaks with the trees stacked up and the sky so wide, and I think it is more beautiful than anything I have ever seen. And I think how much you loved it. And the view is so expansive that it stretches in my mind, lifts away all the restrictions, and I think that I could stay here forever, that I could love it here, love everything about it, that I could have this place forever and make it mine. But it’s too big, and it’s too wild, and it doesn’t belong to me.

  “Rachel loved it up here.” Jed reads my mind as the trail joins the fire road and becomes wide, flat, hemmed with bright green grass. “We can let them run, if you want? Rachel and I used to do it all the time. . . . Addy doesn’t like it.”

  “Yes.” I tear my eyes away from the view, gather myself and my horse. “Let’s go.”

  Jed smiles and then he hoots at his horse, Texas cowboy–style. First the horse dodges sideways but then it splits. Mine comes in fast behind it and we are galloping, racing along the fire road through the woods with no one around for miles on top of miles, and we are free, we are absolutely free out here. Disappearing makes us free.

  Finally, we pull our horses up, prancing, at the top of Eagle Rock.

  “We better brush ’em out really good so Addy doesn’t see the sweat,” Jed says. An eagle calls in the distance, and below us the land falls away in peaks and valleys, lassoed by the winding river.

  * * *

  —

  That afternoon I am cleaning the windows in cabin eight when I hear your mother pull up on her ATV, potions clattering in the basket, her daily check-in to deliver bad news: The world is going to hell, and also there is a conspiracy to make us believe the world is going to hell. The old dogs groan and swirl around her, then spread out on the lawn as she comes up the steps.

  The screen door flaps shut behind her.

  “You were gone a long time this morning.” She steps close to inspect the curtains I have left on the table. I say nothing. “I told Jed to take you up there, but I didn’t tell him to take so long about it. Rachel, are you listening?”

  I look up but she doesn’t catch it, and I don’t correct her. The truth is, it thrills me. This is how I will find you. This is how I will know you. I will become you; I will step into the mystery the way you always tried to with Murder, She Spoke. The way you memorized every detail. You knew Elizabeth Lowe’s stepfather got a call from California days after she went missing. You knew Emma Bernhardt’s mother went swimming after midnight on the night Emma disappeared. You sank into their real lives, into the minutiae, so you saw how every piece worked, how everything came together, but still you didn’t know everything, still the mysteries stayed unsolved, still you could never really know because you couldn’t go back, you couldn’t become your victims, but I can and I will. I will step into your story and I will examine every piece; I will become you because that is what I need to do to know what happened to you. I will risk myself to save you.

  “We went straight up the mountain, and straight back,” I tell your mother, my mother. I don’t mention the hour we spent at the top, letting the horses graze, just talking, our hands in the dirt, our heads tilted up at the sky.

  “A ranch,” Jed said. “I grew up next to a big ’ol Texas ranch—everything’s horses in Abilene—and all I ever wanted was to have a ranch of my own one day. A big-ass, fuck-you ranch. ’Course I just ended up on the rigs. You can make a lot of money that way, but you pay with your life.”

  “And now you’re here.”

  He sighed into his belly, crushed a daffodil. “For however long that lasts. They’re angling to get rid of me. Have been all along. And now they have you.”

  “I’m not pushing anyone out.”

  “No, you’re just another pawn in their game.”

  Your mother shakes her head. “I don’t like him around my horses. He makes them crazy.”

  “I like Jed,” I say, but her words shake something loose in my mind. Didn’t Jed tell me your mother never let him ride the horses? But this morning he told me that both of you used to gallop on them all the time. How much time did he spend with you? How well did he know you?

  “Ha! He’s useless.” She crosses her arms. “I wouldn’t spend too much time around him,” she says like Jed wrote her lines.

  “Why not?”

  “He’s not good enough for you.” Good enough for me or good enough for you?

  Episode 49:

  All the Girls

  That morning when the students arrived at school, they found that all the girls’ lockers had been marked with a slash of blood, which was identified as animal. The principal was appalled but refused to confirm that the girls had been targeted specifically.

  “It was just completely random,” he said. “It was a silly high school prank.”

  Clementine comes through for Friday so easily, it makes me wonder if I am imagining that your mother is controlling. On Thursday evening your mother says, “You can take the morning off to visit Clementine’s school.”

  Jed offers to drive me. I think he just wants an excuse to miss work but I accept it, like I accept everything from him, because it’s easier to see myself as sane if I have a man beside me.

  On Friday morning he is waiting outside the staff cabin in his big black truck, looking just-woke-up pale and fiddling with his keys.

  I pass the dry patch in the garden. It looks bigger, but I don’t have time to investigate it. The vultures are still circling. The sunlight is starting to bake the grass, bringing up the smell of mulch and dead wood. All I want is to get out of here, as quickly as I can.

  I climb into his truck and pop a Dramamine. We pull past your parents’ house, dip down the drive and wind along the road to Happy Camp.

  “What is it that you’re doing for Clementine?” he says once the ranch is no longer in the rearview mirror.

  “I’m talking to her class.” I was so focused on the other part, on trying to get her to tell me about you, that I comple
tely forgot I will have to talk first. I feel the slip of motion sickness, like the world is coming untethered. I should have taken the Dramamine earlier.

  “About what?”

  “About writing.”

  “You’re a writer?”

  I loosen my seat belt. “I am if it means I get to talk to Clementine.” He keeps quiet, and finally I allow, “I probably should have prepared something.”

  He glances over at me with a ringer’s smile on his face, and I wonder what would happen if we just kept driving. I almost say it out loud. I look ahead at the bends in the road and imagine a place where it straightens out, widens into a highway, eight lanes across, where you can get more than static on the radio stations, where the real people live. I feel like Jed would be a different person off the ranch, and I wonder why he doesn’t leave, and then I let myself imagine he is staying for me. I wonder if you ever felt that way.

  “How well did you know Rachel?”

  “We’ve been over this.”

  “Yesterday you said you rode together all the time. But you told me Addy never let you ride the horses.” As I speak, I wonder why I am always letting him off the hook, confronting him about everything, giving him a chance to defend himself. It’s like I want him to be innocent so badly that I am not giving him another option.

  “Addy didn’t know about it.”

  “But then you must have known Rachel better than you said.”

  He takes a moment to craft his answer. “You came out here because of her podcast. Think how compelling she mighta been in person. Yeah, we spent some time together. Yeah, we shot the shit. But I told you, I don’t even think she liked me.”

  “Then why did she hang out with you?”

  “Because, Sera, out here there ain’t a lot of options.”