Watch Me Disappear

by Janelle Brown

  Often I’d wake up in the middle of the night and discover that Billie was missing from our bed. If I tiptoed down the hall and stood outside the door to Olive’s room I would hear the two of them whispering to each other in the dark. When Billie slipped back between our sheets I would roll over to her and ask, “What does she tell you?” “Oh, girl talk,” Billie would murmur. Sometimes I’d peek in on Olive, too, but whenever I crouched by the side of her bed, watching her chest rise and fall, she never woke up.

  Instead of enrolling Olive in preschool, Billie took her on nature walks in Strawberry Canyon; to pick through the tide pools in Pescadero; to hear free concerts in Stern Grove. When neighborhood moms came over to our house and complained about the grind of parenthood—the endless diapers, the whining and the tantrums, the broken sleep—Billie would glance over at Olive, quietly looking at picture books in the corner, and demur. The day when we finally walked Olive over to the local kindergarten, I saw Billie staring at the asphalt yard, the molded-plastic play structure, with a look on her face of pure rage.

  I was jealous of their relationship but also happy to see Billie so lit up by motherhood. I’d think of my own mother, worn down after the death of my sister—sweet but defeated; supportive but incapable of really understanding me—and feel thankful that my daughter had something better, something more intimate and vivid.

  I was also relieved that Olive had one parent who was constantly present. As I’d risen up the ranks at Decode, the technology revolution that I’d insisted was going to make everyone’s life easier had ended up making mine harder. Work spilled into all the previously empty spaces of my life: emails late at night, phone pinging with text messages during meals, round-the-clock deadlines as Decode morphed from a weekly magazine to a wholesale “media company” with hourly updates. I’d somehow enabled a twenty-four-hour rat race in which I could never step off the track. I consoled myself that at least my salary was freeing up Billie, even if all she seemed to want to do with that freedom was focus it on Olive.

  One day I got a call at work from the front desk of Olive’s school, wondering if Olive was feeling better. Apparently, Olive had some kind of terrible virus, had missed kindergarten for three days; they’d been trying to get in touch with Billie, but she wasn’t answering the phone. I hung up, perplexed—hadn’t Olive been sitting there at the breakfast table just that morning, smiling happily in her rainbow jammies as she ate her oatmeal?

  I bailed out of work and headed home. When I walked through the front door, I discovered our house transformed into a Moroccan den. Billie had draped the living room in velvet fabric, blocking out the light from the windows. The furniture was pushed to the walls. There were candles burning on the mantels and on the precarious arms of the sofa, whose cushions were scattered across the floor and repurposed as lounge pillows. Olive and Billie lay there, picture books scattered among the ruins of a picnic. Still in their pajamas at two in the afternoon.

  Seeing me, Olive froze, her guilty conscience written across her face; but Billie began to laugh. “Olive, we are so busted.” She waved me down into their den, and I tucked myself into the tiny space beside them. Books slid under my rear: Greek goddesses, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen.

  “So, what’s going on here?” I asked.

  Olive looked at her mother and then me. “We’re doing math this week, and Ms. Chang made me cry, so Mommy said I don’t have to go to school if I don’t want to.”

  Billie wrapped a protective arm around Olive. “Olive came up with her own method for doing subtraction, and the teacher told her she wasn’t allowed to do it that way. What the fuck. They’re trying to zap every bit of creativity right out of her.” She squeezed our daughter against her chest. “We’re not sending her back there.”

  I struggled to absorb this. “But why didn’t you tell me?”

  “The last thing you need is more stress. I thought I’d tell you once I’d figured out the solution.” She looked down at Olive, smoothed the fuzzy part of her hair. “Besides, I needed some time with my baby. I missed her.”

  Olive smiled up at me, smelling like animal crackers and orange juice. “Mommy says that sometimes it’s important to have a secret,” she said.

  I remember raising an eyebrow at Billie and seeing her look back at me, wide-eyed: Who, me? Then she unfolded herself, standing up so that the drapes caressed her dark hair, as if they, too, couldn’t help but want to touch her. Looming above us, the candles flickering across her face, she looked giant, heroic. “Isn’t it, though?” she said. “When Olive looks back at her childhood, what will she remember? All those identical days in the classroom or the few days we played hooky together?”

  Billie was right, of course. Although Olive was enrolled in a new school by the following Monday, that stolen week remains one of her most vivid childhood memories: “The time Mom pretended to homeschool me by feeding me cookies in a fort in the living room.”

  Other people didn’t get this about our marriage. When I told my parents what Billie had done, they reacted as if the fact that she didn’t confer with me on every single child-rearing decision was something to be worried about. But I understood the opposite: that magic was an essential part of what made Billie such a good mom, magic that was antithetical to the conventional and mundane. Yes, Billie sometimes went rogue, but I also never received the kind of desperate accusatory phone calls I often overheard at the office—“When are you coming home? The baby is crying, we need milk, you’re late.” Billie had rejected this corrosive side of parenthood, the part where two people bicker over territorial lines in the sand. She trusted that everything would all work itself out, that we would all find each other in the end. And we always did.

  Later that night, after Olive had been tucked in bed, Billie and I went back to her Moroccan den and drank a bottle of wine and had sex by candlelight. Afterward, she poked at a velvet curtain, sending the shadows shimmering across it. “I always wanted a secret hideout when I was a kid,” she said. “Once I built one in my bedroom, and you know what my father did when he found it? He knocked it to the ground and then took me down to the basement and shut me inside. Said that an honest person wouldn’t need to keep secrets, and besides there are no secrets from God, I couldn’t hide from His judgment, and that I should think about that while I said my prayers.”

  She laughed, a sharp ironic bark. “When I was twelve, I found his porn stash hidden under the porch. It was all Barely Legal kind of stuff, cheerleaders and girls in bobby socks. So much for no secrets, right?” She paused, remembering. “A few years after that was when he got caught feeling up my best friend.”

  “Jesus, Billie. I’m so sorry.”

  She glanced over at me, shaking her head. “No. I don’t want you feeling sorry for me. I don’t feel sorry for myself. I made sure that didn’t define me.”

  So I quietly held her in my arms, wondering how she’d managed to spin magic out of that mess, to be such a terrific parent when she’d had such bad ones. Perhaps we were not doomed to echo our parents after all; perhaps we truly had the ability to write our own life stories, to change the endings if we wanted to. Together, the two of us could build something entirely new.

  With Billie, I felt the freedom in this possibility.

  JONATHAN SITS ON THE FLOOR of Billie’s bedroom closet, sorting through sixteen years of his wife’s existence. Stacks of musty sweaters and grass-stained running shoes; socks missing their mates, holes at the heels; silk scarves received as Christmas gifts from Jonathan’s mother and rarely worn. Bowls full of unidentified buttons, a dusty stack of old Outside magazines, a box stuffed full of Olive’s grade school artwork.

  A growing line of shopping bags stands sentry outside the closet, scrawled with Sharpie instructions: SAVE—DISCARD—DONATE—GIVE TO OLIVE.

  He’s already tackled the vanity and the overflowing master bathroom drawers. Billie’s hairbrush, woven with dark threads: into the trash. The oxycodone she was prescribed after a biking
accident but never took: put aside for recycling. Her jewelry box, filled with tangled chains: give to Olive. Congealing bottles of expensive hand lotion, yellowing packets of holiday novelty tissues, four different kinds of sport sunscreen. Flotsam of little importance—just stuff—and yet together it somehow added up to a human being, each worn-out sandal or solitary earring a moment, a decision, a reflection of taste and opinion.

  And this stuff—it’s everywhere. In every room, every drawer, every countertop. Even the freezer: Just last week, Harmony unearthed a Ziploc of frostbitten scones labeled in Billie’s handwriting: CRANBERRY-LEMON. Harmony was about to throw it in the trash when she noticed the panicked look on Jonathan’s face. She silently put it back where she’d found it.

  He knew—he’s known—that the refusal to purge was a kind of magical thinking: as if Billie might walk back in the door and be furious to discover that he’d donated her clothes to the Salvation Army. He’s treated Billie’s possessions like totems, keeping the possibility of her alive; keeping her fresh in his mind. No wonder Olive’s attempting to hallucinate her mother back into existence, he thinks. Billie’s the only piece missing here: Olive’s just completing the puzzle.

  This morning when he woke up, he decided it was finally time. Olive’s mental health was clearly at stake. They were heading into rocky waters again, with the anniversary coming up; he needed to do everything he could to help Olive through that, even if it meant confronting the task he’d spent an entire year avoiding. Jonathan had waited until Olive left for the day—he’d allowed her to take the Subaru into the city with Natalie for cryptically described teen girl entertainments (museums, shopping, sugar consumption) with the promise that she’d check in via text—before yanking open the freezer and retrieving the bag of frostbitten scones. He tossed these in the trash and replaced the lid with a click of gut-wrenching finality.

  Then he went upstairs to Billie’s closet, opened the doors, and inhaled its familiar smell. It no longer smelled quite so much like her; mostly, it smelled like dust and old sneakers.

  Three hours and eleven garbage bags later, Jonathan feels—well, not good, exactly, but a whole lot better than he’d anticipated. This is necessary for both of you, he chastises himself as he tosses a pile of old T-shirts in a bag (pausing to press a lingering finger against a familiar turmeric-colored stain and recall, Lamb curry). Part of the process. We need to start moving forward.

  (And yet doesn’t he know firsthand, because of Jenny, that that’s not how it works? That grief isn’t something you can walk away from after a finite amount of time, but is something that washes you along, tumbling you in and out with the tides?)

  He climbs on the stepladder to check the top shelf, where he discovers one last dusty shoe box, shoved toward the back. He pulls this out, sits cross-legged on the closet floor, and opens it. Inside are a handful of childhood photographs and a stack of yellowed sketchbooks.

  He starts with the photographs first. He has seen them before, but it’s been years. There’s a Sears portrait of Billie as a toddler, stuffed into a frilly white dress, her mouth curling down into the start of a wail; and a photograph of her parents posed stiff as flagpoles in front of a rusting station wagon. They look like they’ve stepped out of 1952, even though the picture was surely taken in the late seventies, their faces gray and grim. Behind them, a dust-stricken Central Valley farmhouse, a tire swing shaded by an orchard of almond trees.

  He turns the photos over to examine the backs, but they aren’t labeled. How sad, he thinks. The only remaining pictures of Billie’s family, exiled to a forgotten shoe box. Then again, Billie wasn’t one to romanticize her unhappy childhood. She’d run away from home—some tiny rural hamlet outside Bakersfield—during her last year of high school, not long after her father got caught molesting her friend. She never spoke to her parents again. Not even a birth announcement when Olive was born. “Why would I want to do that?” she said when Jonathan made the suggestion, and he could have sworn he saw the hair on her neck stand up. It reminded him of a dog with raised hackles. “They get what they deserve. They have no right to enjoy my life now.”

  He stares at the picture of her parents, trying to imagine his wife springing from the loins of these two unpleasant strangers. And yet there’s something of Billie in her mother’s face, coarser and faded but with the same firm set to her chin. Maybe Billie’s mother would have been beautiful, too, if she’d lived a different life.

  He puts these aside and lifts the cover of one of the notebooks. Inside are sketches—pencil renderings of his own face, captured back in his twenties. In one of them, Jonathan gazes directly at the artist, his lips parted as if he’s about to speak, his eyes squinting slightly as if looking into a bright light. He stares at it, remembering the way Billie used to sketch him all the time when they first met. Later, it was all landscapes.

  He’s about to put this in the GIVE TO OLIVE pile when he notices a photograph stuck to the back of the sketchbook. He carefully peels it off and examines it. It’s a Polaroid of Billie that he’s never seen before, probably taken around age twenty or twenty-one, during her Lost Years. She’s almost unrecognizable: The girl he’d meet years later as a brunette with a pixie cut here has long bleached-blond tangles. There’s a stud in the tender flesh of her nose, a ring in her eyebrow. She’s wearing wire-rimmed glasses instead of the contacts she’d later upgrade to, and she gazes through them directly at the camera, as if staring it down.

  Behind her, his arm wrapped possessively around her neck, is a young man with eyes as black and inscrutable as a crow’s, peering out from a face otherwise obscured by wild curly hair and several weeks’ worth of stubble. He grins smugly at the camera. Jonathan turns the photo over and reads the writing on the back: Sidney, 1992.

  He flips the photo back over to study it more closely. Sidney was Billie’s boyfriend during her Lost Years, a former philosophy major turned anarchist-activist drug dealer. They’d met not long after Billie had run away from home; together, they moved around the Pacific Northwest for years, until Sidney was finally arrested with a stash of drugs—pot? or acid? Jonathan can’t remember—in the trunk of his car. It was his third strike. He got twenty years.

  “Oh God, Sidney” was the way Billie always referred to him. As in, “Oh God, Sidney. I can’t believe I stayed with him for so long.” Still, whenever she talked about him, she got a hot look on her face, as if she secretly relished the brazen things they’d done together: “You want to hear about stupid, try chaining yourself to an old-growth redwood while high on three tabs of acid with a half-dozen bulldozers full of angry loggers coming straight at you. Yeah, Sidney did that. He got three weeks in jail for that stunt. Right intentions, wrong execution, and of course I was left to clean up his mess.”

  Billie fled the Pacific Northwest right after Sidney was arrested for the last time, “scared straight,” as she put it. She traveled the world for several years before heading to San Francisco in the late nineties in order to take advantage of the dot-com boom. By the time Jonathan met her on the J Church streetcar just after the end of the millennium, she was finishing a graphic design degree at the Academy of Art, learning HTML, and utterly broke.

  He turns the photo in his hands, thinking. He knows nothing about Sidney, really, not even his last name. They met only once, and briefly, at Billie’s memorial service—the man had come out of nowhere, probably lured out from the rock he was living under by the press reports about Billie’s death. He gripped Jonathan’s hand and muttered a string of unfinished thoughts—“Sorry, that woman, Jesus”—and then disappeared again as Jonathan reeled, astonished by his presence. He left an impression of stubble and flannel and stringy unkempt hair, and a sharp smell, something itchy and intense oozing from his pores.

  Jonathan later regretted not talking more to him that day, because Sidney had always been the mystery at the center of Billie’s Lost Years, the character Jonathan least understood. Not because Billie failed to talk about him but becaus
e Jonathan could never quite wrap his head around the archetype. Jonathan hadn’t exactly encountered a lot of convicted criminals in his life—they didn’t hang around Stanford, or the Berkeley Bowl, or the cubicles of Decode magazine—so Sidney felt more mythical than real, like a character from a fairy tale: the Bad News Boyfriend. Up until the memorial, Jonathan didn’t even know what Sidney looked like: Billie had lost all her photos from those years when her backpack was stolen while she was traveling in India.

  Or so she said, he realizes now. Because apparently there was this one photo, which she had kept hidden away. He studies it, wondering—why? It’s not like they kept in touch: The one time Sidney wrote to her from jail a few years back, she burned the letter without even reading it.

  Probably she just wanted to put that period of her life firmly behind her, he thinks now. She never did seem particularly nostalgic about her past, not even in the early days of their relationship, when he was plying her for stories. Instead, both Lost Years Billie and Art Student Billie were swiftly supplanted by Berkeley Mom Billie, who emerged when Olive was born a year after they married. That had taken Jonathan by surprise. This new Billie spent her days ferrying Olive from playdates to Mommy and Me music, baking from-scratch cupcakes, and hosting kids’ birthday parties at Fairyland. Baby-Wearing Club charter member, room mom, PTA secretary, silent-auction chair: It was as if motherhood had been a role she was determined to conquer. He sometimes suspected that Billie was attempting to rewrite her own dysfunctional childhood through her relationship with their daughter. How else to explain why someone with such a fiercely independent edge would pivot into a life of such domesticity?