Watch Me Disappear

by Janelle Brown

  Natalie’s dad is a lawyer who speaks in monosyllables, and her mom is a lawyer who screams, and it’s obvious that the only reason the divorce papers haven’t been drawn up yet is because they are waiting for Natalie to graduate. Her family is rich, like a lot of the kids Olive goes to school with. Not mansion-rich—not in Berkeley—but the kind of rich where they spend vacations in France and drive German cars and live in houses where everything is new and imported from Scandinavia.

  Today Natalie’s frizzy curls have sprung free from her headband and she’s untied her regulation Claremont tie (a short, stubby, peach-colored thing; Claremont Girls hate that tie, in all its limp-dicked androgyny) so that it hangs slackly on either side of her neck. Her blazer, which she’s decorated with a collection of feminist lapel pins (WELL-BEHAVED WOMEN SELDOM MAKE HISTORY), is wadded up and dangling perilously from the straps of her backpack.

  Natalie plops down in the chair opposite Olive, casting a glance at the homeless man at the other end of the table. She twitches her nose, then delicately drapes a hand across it to mask the smell. “What’s up? You OK?” Natalie’s voice is far too brassy for the library, and a woman at the next table turns and hisses at them.

  “Yeah. Why?” Olive glances discreetly down at her pile of books, their covers a glaring advertisement for her dalliance with the supernatural.

  “You’re sitting here with your eyes closed, looking kind of clinical.” Natalie tilts her head, noticing the books on the table. She spins them around to examine the titles. “WTF, Olive. Exploring Psychic Evolution? Who’s assigning you this stuff? Turnbull? This looks way more interesting than my sociology reading list.”

  Olive pulls the book back, her face getting hot. “It’s not an assignment.”

  Natalie laughs. “So, what, you’re psychic or something?” She looks up and sees Olive’s expression. “Oh. Oh! Seriously? You’re kidding, right? Where’s this coming from?”

  Olive hesitates for what feels like a minute but is probably only seconds. Then she lowers her voice to a whisper: “If I tell you that I spoke to my mom yesterday, will you say that I’m nuts?”

  Natalie stares at her for a long time; and just when Olive is convinced that this was a mistake and she’s about to become the social pariah of Claremont Prep, even more than she already is—crazytown!—Natalie leans in. “You know, my grandma used to swear that she could talk with my dead grandpa.” She speaks in an excited whisper. “She said she’d wake up in bed in the middle of the night and hear him snoring right next to her. And sometimes, when I used to visit her house? I swear things would move around when we weren’t in the room. Little things, like spoons and mail.”

  Natalie looks at Olive, big brown eyes unblinking, smiling as if she’s just offered a gift. Olive, grateful, resists the urge to reach out and grab Natalie’s hand, to squeeze her friend’s soft fingers between her own. “I had a vision of my mom while I was walking to class yesterday,” she says. “Right in the middle of the Sunshine Wing.”

  Natalie’s eyebrows shoot up a half inch. “You saw her ghost?”

  Olive leans in. “Here’s the thing—I’m pretty sure that my mom wasn’t a ghost.” She can feel herself getting swept away again, by the exhilaration of that moment. “She spoke to me really clearly—she told me she missed me and that I should look for her.” Olive fingers the cover of A Skeptic’s Guide to Parapsychology. “Natalie—I think she’s alive.”

  Natalie’s necktie has snaked down from around her neck; it coils on the table, forgotten. “Alive. OK.” Something flickers across her face—something loose and sad, like pity—but it passes. She leans back and looks up at the ceiling of the library as if absorbed by something she’s just spotted there. “Wow. That’s intense.”

  “You believe me?”

  Natalie’s eyes drop and they skip across Olive’s face, measuring. She sits there spinning Connections in a slow circle with the tip of her finger. “They never found your mom’s body, right?” She seems to arrive at a decision, and an odd sound comes out of her mouth, half gasp and half laugh. “Wouldn’t that be amazing? Oh, Olive! You saw her? You actually talked to her?”

  Olive nods, at a loss for words.

  Natalie wrinkles her nose. “But—if she’s alive, where is she?”

  “Yeah,” Olive says. “That’s what I need to figure out. Also why we haven’t heard from her in the last year.”

  Natalie sits back in her chair, tugging absently at the end of her ponytail. “Maybe someone abducted her when she was hiking,” she offers. Then, registering the distress on Olive’s face: “Or maybe she just has amnesia?”

  Olive glances down at her notebook. “That’s on my list. But it sounds like something out of a cheesy soap opera.”

  “Transient global amnesia. That’s what it was called.” Natalie gives the ponytail a yank and holds it there, thinking. Her voice grows more determined. “We talked about it in our psych section, remember? It happens with head injuries. You can’t remember anything for more than a minute. Like that old movie.”

  Olive tries to imagine how her mom might have managed to lose her mind and stumble out of Desolation Wilderness unseen. Still, it’s the option she likes the most. “But if she has amnesia, how does she know to contact me?” she wonders.

  Natalie shrugs. “Maybe it’s subliminal or something. You’re tapping into her subconscious thoughts? Some kind of, I don’t know, telepathic bond?”

  Olive likes this, an invisible cord connecting her with her mother. “I’ll buy that. Big question is, how do I find her?”

  “Do you think she’s up in the forest? Surviving on rainwater and berries?”

  Olive thinks about this. She can recall in vivid detail the photos of Desolation Wilderness that she downloaded off the Internet last year, a folder full of hiker candids and nature photography that she studied, wondering where in all that forbidding vastness her mom might be. Trying to pinpoint exactly which ravine was the one where they found her mother’s lost hiking boot, buried in the muck. She shakes her head. “By this point, either someone would have found her or she would have figured her way out, right? Anyway, I saw her on a beach.” She thinks. “I couldn’t tell which one, though. Pacific Ocean, probably, judging by what the water looked like.”

  Natalie’s hands slide down to rest on the table, her body growing still as she relaxes into the idea. “What was her favorite beach? I remember reading that people with amnesia subconsciously gravitate toward places that meant something to them. You could start by going there, bring her photo with you and ask around in case someone’s seen her.”

  Olive thinks about this. “I don’t know my mom’s favorite beach. She went to a lot of them.”

  “Maybe ask your dad?”

  Olive shakes her head. “I tried to tell him about seeing Mom. He told me I was just hallucinating.”

  Natalie rolls her eyes as her phone begins to bleat in her backpack. A half-dozen heads turn to stare at them. Natalie makes her Who, me? innocent face back at them, then stands up, winding her tie around her fist. “That’s my mom, she’s waiting for me in the car outside.” She stops, looking at Olive. “You’re doing OK? You’re not freaking out about this?”

  Olive nods, standing. “I’m fine,” she says, and it’s true: With Natalie standing there across from her, she feels like it’s all making more sense. “I just wish I knew what to do.”

  “I can help. Just let me know how,” Natalie says. Abruptly, she leans over the table and gives Olive a hug. They stand there like that for a minute, the wooden table biting into the tops of their legs, their reaching arms awkwardly pressing against their necks. Olive can feel Natalie’s warm breath on her skin, and it sets off goose bumps.

  Natalie pulls back first. “Text if you think of anything, OK?” she chirps. She heads for the exit, humping her stack of books in the crook of her arm.

  Olive checks the time on her cellphone. At the end of her table, the homeless man has fallen asleep with his head on folded arms;
a rivulet of drool pools on the pages of his book. Olive locates a granola bar at the bottom of her backpack and slides it over toward him, leaving it within reach of his yellowed fingernails, then starts to gather her things.

  —

  At home, Olive sits at her desk for a long time, staring uncomprehendingly at her German homework but mostly thinking about her mom. In her lap, Catsby-the-cat purrs, while above her head, Gizmo—a one-legged parakeet Olive found in the garden last spring—rattles her birdcage bell, working valiantly to taunt the cat. Downstairs, Olive’s father is banging around the kitchen, most likely overcompensating for her mom’s death by making some unnecessarily elaborate dinner.

  She knows that her father wants her to keep him company while he cooks; the weird hungry look he gets on his face whenever she walks into the kitchen makes her feel like the shittiest daughter on the face of the earth. But she never really knows what to say to him anymore; it’s like there’s a giant Mom-shaped vortex in the room just sucking up all the air. Plus, he isn’t at ease around her, the way Mom was: He tries too hard. He wants it too much. He cracks silly jokes to make her laugh, probably because when she smiles, he can reassure himself that she’s actually not too sad. But she is sad. She feels like she’s failing him every time she opens her mouth, so it’s easier to stay up here in her room and hope that he figures out how to be happy by himself.

  She stares blankly at her homework, unable to focus. It’s barely six o’clock and already pitch-black out, the clouds damping all light; when she tries to look out the window to the street, all she can see is her own reflection. A face as bland and unmemorable as instant oatmeal, a body that falls straight from neck to thigh with no sign of a waist. She knows she’s not supposed to care so much that she’s not beautiful, like her mother—there are so many more important things to worry about, like Ebola and ocean acidification levels—but she can’t help herself.

  She turns to the Rainer Maria Rilke poem she’s supposed to be memorizing:

  Lass dir Alles geschehn: Schönheit und Schrecken.

  Man muss nur gehn: Kein Gefühl ist das fernste.

  Lass dich von mir nicht trennen.

  “Olive?” She hears her dad calling up the stairs. In her lap, Catsby hisses, the hair along his back lifting. He stabs Olive through her sweatpants with bared claws, and she yelps, jumping up. As she does, she abruptly feels so faint that she has to grip the arm of her desk chair and sit back down again. It’s as if the house is dropping out from below her, tipping her off-balance, and she’s in danger of flying right off the surface of the planet. That strange smell again—something burning. She looks back up at the window to orient herself and has just enough time to think Oh my God as she recognizes her mother’s form mirrored back at her.

  Billie stands a few feet behind Olive’s chair. She looks just as she did yesterday—same hair, same dress, same bemused expression. Olive sits motionless, battling excitement and nausea, afraid that if she turns around to see whether her mother is really standing behind her, the moment will pass. Instead, she stares at her mother’s reflection in the window, transfixed by the familiar way Billie is holding her elbow with one cupped hand, the way her hair blows around her ears, the clench of her thigh muscles outlined underneath the white dress.

  This is real, she thinks happily, only now realizing that she’s been half worried that she imagined the whole thing. She stares at her mom and waits for her to speak.

  But Billie says nothing. She smiles, puts a hand on her hip, cocks an eyebrow. As they look at each other, time grows elastic, stretching and contracting. Olive tries to take in a detail that might help her pinpoint a location—is her mom standing on the beach, and is it one that Olive recognizes?—but the reflection is too indistinct to see clearly. Still, she can sense a vast open space and a night sky shot through with stars, an implausible number of stars.

  “So, are you going to stop staring and get off your duff?” Billie suddenly asks in a voice so loud it makes Olive jump. “You keep sitting there and the world will pass you by.”

  “Sorry, Mom,” Olive says. “You have to help me. Where are you?”

  Billie gives an impatient shake of her head, as if waiting for Olive to figure it out herself. The air seems to dance around her head, a soft flurry of tiny wings flickering through the dark. Are those moths?

  “Just tell me—” Olive says, more urgently, right as her father opens the door to her bedroom. For one disorienting second, it feels as if all three of them are there in the room, like old times. In that fleeting moment, Olive feels the best she’s felt all year.

  “Dad, look,” she blurts, leaping up; but by the time she spins fully around, there is no one standing behind her chair at all. Just her father with an oven mitt on one hand and a small square of paper in the other. She turns back to the window, but her mother has vanished from view. All she can see is the barren oak tree in their front yard shaking in the wind, its battered branches illuminated by the neighbor’s motion-detector light.

  Her father follows her gaze back out the window. “Yeah, I should trim that tree before it ends up in our living room,” he says. He turns back, registering Olive’s odd expression. “Hey. You feeling all right?” He is overly solicitous, smiling a little too hard, and Olive can tell that he’s feeling guilty about their argument the previous night. “All that German poetry giving you weltschmerz?”

  For a second, she debates telling him. But what’s the point? He clearly didn’t see her mom, and Olive isn’t interested in a rehash of their previous conversation. “Es geht mir gut,” she says instead.

  “Das ist gut.” He grins, and the lines in his face deepen, and Olive can glimpse why the Claremont Moms always get so self-conscious when he shows up at school. The square jaw that looks so awkward on her makes him look strong and capable, and he’s got thick sandy hair that’s shaggy enough to make him look vaguely cool for a dad, and his deep-set gray eyes are framed by long, dark lashes. Olive doesn’t have those lashes. This is patently unfair.

  Her father is talking. “Look, I want to go back to what you said last night.” Before Olive can interject, he shoves the scrap of paper he’s holding into her hand. It’s a business card: MEREDITH ALBRIGHT, FAMILY THERAPIST. “I think maybe it would help you to talk about your mom with someone. And this woman, she’s supposedly a really terrific therapist.” He pauses. “Harmony recommended her.”

  “Harmony?” Olive repeats her name, aghast. “You told her what I said?”

  Harmony always seems to be around these days, puttering around the kitchen or cutting flowers in the garden or hanging out with Dad in their living room, as if she’s slid into the spot that Olive’s mother only recently vacated. It was nice at first to have her mom’s friend there helping out; plus, Harmony was good at lifting Olive’s dad out of that heavy blankness that hung over him in the months after Mom died. He didn’t drink as much when Harmony was around. But it’s been a year now, and her dad is doing a lot better—especially since he began writing the memoir—so she’s ready for Harmony to start having her own life again rather than invading theirs.

  Her father looks taken aback by her reaction. “I just told her that it seemed like you were still struggling with your mom’s death.”

  Olive can’t help herself. “Mom’s not dead. I told you I saw her.”

  Her father flinches. “Look, just hear me out. Maybe you did see your mother, maybe you didn’t. Either way, it can’t hurt to go talk to a professional about it, can it?”

  Why do adults think that every problem can be fixed by sending you to talk to a more qualified adult? Olive thinks. It’s like a game of hot potato: Whenever you have an idea or emotion that doesn’t fit comfortably into the box that the world has built for you, everyone goes into a frenzy trying to find an expert who can convince you to climb back inside. Olive is tired of therapists, of career counselors and school nurses, with their pointless worksheets and probing questions that accomplish exactly nothing.

  You
keep sitting there and the world will pass you by.

  But then she looks back up at her dad, noticing his hopeful expression. His eyes are ringed with puffy circles of fatigue, as if the day has drained him. She wishes she could share with him the lightness inside her, her belief that things are about to change for the better. She isn’t crazytown. She is clearheaded and calm, as if she’s about to walk into a classroom and ace a midterm for which she is 100 percent prepared.

  Dad may not believe me now, she thinks, but he will when I find Mom.

  “Whatever,” she says. “Sure. Fine. Warum nicht?”

  “Great,” he says, brightening. “Thanks, Bean. I’m glad.” He slides his arm around her shoulder and gives her upper arm a playful nip with the oven mitt.

  “Yeah, but Dad,” she says. “For the record. You don’t need to worry about me.”

  Her father laughs. “It’s just my nature,” he says as he starts to back out of her bedroom. “Dinner’s almost ready. Fettuccine Alfredo.”

  “I’ll be down in a minute.” Olive flips off her lamp and grabs her German reader to mark her place. Then she stops, scanning the translation of the Rilke poem:

  Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

  Just keep going. No feeling is final.

  Don’t let yourself lose me.

  I won’t lose you, Mom, she thinks. She seizes on the image of her mom’s face flickering in the dark. And then she knows: Not moths. Butterflies.

  She fishes her phone out of her backpack and types up a quick text to Natalie. Offer 4 help still good? Let’s go 2 beach this Sat. I have an idea where Mom might be.

  The answer comes back two seconds later. Pick me up at 10.

  Olive deletes the messages from her iPhone history, to be on the safe side, before going downstairs to join her father.

  In the early years of her life, Olive was her mother’s shadow, one fist always clutching at the fabric of Billie’s pants as she went about the day. She bumped around in Billie’s wake, undeterred by flour in her hair and water splashed in her face and bruises on her toes. I sometimes wondered if this would eventually drive Billie crazy, but if anything, she seemed to encourage it.