Watch Me Disappear

by Janelle Brown

  Billie’s artistic ambitions also seemed to fizzle, not long after her first solo show failed to sell out. She settled into part-time freelance Web design work, mostly designing logos and banner ads for dot-coms. On the weekends, she sometimes pulled out her paints, but whenever he encouraged her to make a real go of her art, she recoiled. “And what? End up being one of those artists whose work hangs forgotten on the walls of the local Brew Ha Ha, getting splattered with latte foam? I’d rather paint only for myself.”

  Had he failed to give her something she needed to thrive? He couldn’t quite tell, and whenever he raised the subject with her, she insisted she was perfectly happy with the way things were. “Why, you don’t think motherhood is a valid life choice?” she finally snapped; and she was right. His doubt was unfair. If she didn’t express any regret about the life she’d left behind—the oils going dry, the travel backpack sold in a yard sale, the tribal tattoos long ago zapped away—who was he to fixate on it?

  After a while, he almost forgot about Lost Years Billie. So it was a shock, five years back, when they bumped into Harmony up on College Avenue one afternoon. They’d taken Olive out for ice cream and were walking back home with their melting cones when, from behind them, a woman’s voice had tentatively called out: “Sparrow? Is that you?”

  Billie froze for a second. One hand jerked reflexively up in the air, and a wild expression crossed her face; for a heart-stopping moment, it was as if he was looking at the untamed girl she once was, someone capable of things that he couldn’t quite wrap his head around. She turned. “Oh my God. Harmony.”

  Jonathan turned to see a pretty blond woman in a batik sundress, all soft and fluttery, rushing toward them. “Sparrow?” he muttered to his wife.

  Billie kept her eyes focused on the woman in her path. “It was my nickname way back when. Don’t laugh.” A smile spread itself across her face as the woman ran into her arms. She murmured into the woman’s hair, her mint-chip cone dripping green goo on her friend’s shoulder. “Harmony. My God. What are you doing here?”

  Harmony pulled back and gestured at a man who was coolly sauntering up behind her, in a vintage three-piece suit despite the heat. Jonathan, in flip-flops and stained shorts, grimaced in awkward acknowledgment. “We just moved here from Austin. Sean got a job as an associate professor in the MFA program at Mills. He’s a poet!” The boyfriend gave an ironic little smile, his eyes twitching toward Billie’s snug T-shirt, but she seemed too absorbed in her long-lost friend to notice.

  “I can’t believe it. All these years.” Billie glanced over at Jonathan and then smiled at Olive, who was staring at her mother as if she were a stranger. “Harmony and I knew each other up in Oregon.”

  “We used to—” Harmony hesitated and glanced at Billie, as if searching for the right shorthand.

  “Go to protests together,” Billie finished.

  Harmony dimpled. “We met at a sit-in, right? The dam that was endangering the wild salmon?”

  “It was spotted owls,” Billie corrected her a little sharply.

  “That’s right!” Harmony leaned down toward Olive, who was soaking all this in with her mouth slightly agape. “I was in my first year at U of O, fresh in from the suburbs, and your mom was this gorgeous independent rebel type from California, and oh my God, I just idolized her. She was always the most confident person in the room.”

  Billie laughed, and Jonathan noticed a slightly manic edge to her hilarity. “She still is,” Jonathan quipped, but neither of the women seemed to register his presence. They circled each other, gripping each other’s arms a little too tightly.

  In the years that ensued, it sometimes felt like the two women had never let go. Every time he walked into the kitchen, there they were, deep into a bottle of wine and whispering to each other, glancing up at him with an enigmatic expression. Harmony seemed to wake up something inside Billie, something he’d never seen in her when she hung out with her revolving group of kombucha-drinking Berkeley mom friends.

  On the surface, Billie and Harmony didn’t seem to have terribly much in common. Harmony was a personal chef/caterer, although this was just the most recent iteration of an otherwise haphazard career that also included soy-candle-making, food blogging, and kundalini yoga instruction; she was in and out of relationships and had lived in seven cities over the last decade. She was pliable and nurturing in all the places where Billie was spiky and opinionated, and sometimes Jonathan was surprised that Billie had chosen her as her friend. Then again, it was difficult not to like Harmony, the way she slid into their lives like a warm fuzzy blanket, dispensing hugs and foot massages and freshly baked cookies. Billie seemed to regard Harmony as the little sister she’d never had: fondly, committedly, but not without exasperation.

  He looks back down at the photographs and the sketchbook, at the pencil strokes in Billie’s familiar hand, stricken with a sickening feeling of lost time. He sets the sketchbook in the box and pushes it toward the growing GIVE TO OLIVE pile. He puts aside Billie’s childhood photographs to frame. The snapshot of Sidney and Billie he shoves into the pocket of his sweatshirt, not sure what to do with it.

  He opens another shoe box, this one less dusty, and finds Billie’s collection of marathon finisher medals. He stirs them around with his hand, cheap ribbons and clattering aluminum, and then fishes one out. San Francisco Half Marathon, 2012.

  Billie’s late-in-life obsession with outdoor sports started with boot camp. She won a gift certificate at a Claremont Girls fall fundraiser and went to the first class out of idle curiosity. She came home enthralled with her teacher, Rita, a platinum-haired cancer survivor with a tattoo of lucky dice above her mastectomy scars. Rita was brash, gutter-mouthed, unapologetic. Rita had brushed up against her own mortality and survived. Rita was fearless and did whatever she wanted.

  Rita talked Billie into trail running, then half marathons, then mountain biking, which led, inevitably, to hiking and mountain climbing. Billie latched on to her new hobby the way she often did with new interests: obsessively, as if determined to master it. Jonathan didn’t mind, not at first. It was good that Billie had something to challenge her, especially now that their daughter was pulling away into the self-reliance of puberty. Plus, something of Lost Years Billie had reawakened in her with the return of Harmony; it turned out that the environmentalist who willingly camped out in a giant redwood tree for months at a time hadn’t been entirely extinguished. Maybe Billie had lost interest in the activism of those years—driving the long way around Earth Day protests, shunning the local Sierra Club chapter—but she still had nature in her heart.

  In the last year of Billie’s life, the outdoor adventure trips started devouring entire weekends, jaunts with Rita that took her all over the West Coast, leaving Jonathan and Olive behind. Jonathan didn’t particularly like this—not the days-long abandonment, not the somewhat dangerous nature of the activities—but it wasn’t his place to object. She needed something for herself, especially considering the hours that Decode was demanding now that he was senior management; it wasn’t fair that she had to hold up the rest of their lives single-handedly. So he said nothing when she packed up her backpack and headed off to the mountains, not even to point out that maybe it wasn’t wise to go hiking alone.

  The things you regret in retrospect.

  Jonathan shoves the medals back in the box and blows his nose. He stands and examines a pile of hiking gear heaped in a basket in the corner of the closet. Picking up a pair of climbing gloves, he turns them in his hands, remembering his wife heading off at the break of dawn for a weekend climb up Mount Shasta with Rita. The sideways light of a summer sunrise; Jonathan groggy from a late night at work, conscious and present only out of a sense of needing to see her off. Her profile to him as she jammed energy bars and freeze-dried meals into her backpack, which smelled like the factory in which it was made. Her spandex-clad rear end flexing as she stretched, the swish of the nylon of her shell, her twin braids swinging under her baseball cap. A
map spread out on the counter, trails marked in red.

  He grips the gloves in his fist. What to do with this stuff? Some of it is barely used. And it’s not as if Olive has ever shown any interest in mountain climbing.

  But Rita climbs, it occurs to him. He experiences a quick pang of nostalgia for Billie’s quirky friend. They’d never spoken after the memorial service, although Rita had sent a giant tropical orchid plant that Jonathan promptly killed with neglect. He hadn’t even thanked her, finding it far beyond his capabilities at the time to acknowledge the countless condolence bouquets that were ghoulishly dying all over his home.

  I should call her up and give her the hiking gear, he thinks. He looks at the gloves and then the mountains of Billie’s belongings, the dresser drawers and bedside tables that he has yet to tackle. I’ll finish up later, he decides. And then he fishes his cellphone out of his pocket and pecks his way down the contact list in search of Rita’s phone number.

  —

  Rita hasn’t changed much in the year since Jonathan last saw her. Her cropped hair is still a blond so platinum that it looks almost white, sprayed aggressively in place, and she wears neon-pink trainers with her skull-print hoodie and camouflage jogging pants. Her skin is unnaturally tan for this overcast Northern California morning.

  “Jonathan,” she says, sitting across from him. “It’s really great to see you. You’re OK? Olive’s OK?”

  They’ve met at a café not far from Rita’s house in Oakland, not one of those new on-trend pour-over coffee places but an old-school diner that Rita recommended, where the coffee costs a buck and tastes like burnt peanuts. Their waitress is old and Slavic and appears to be talking to herself as she swipes at their table with a rag that smells like sour milk. Through the window, Jonathan can see an underfunded public school across the street, kids playing on a playground pieced together from old pipes and discarded tires. So much concrete, so hard on knees and elbows and developing brains. Sometimes he wonders if he’s spending a fortune on Olive’s fancy private school purely so that when she falls, she lands on grass.

  Rita has ordered a plate of scrambled eggs with fruit. He watches as she takes the syrup pitcher off the counter and drowns her meal. She catches him staring and shrugs apologetically. “I hate eggs. This is the only way I can gag them down. But I’ve got an Iron Girl race in three weeks, so I have to load up on protein.” She makes a face at her fork. “Let me tell you, the second I cross that finish line, I’m going to face-plant into a pile of doughnuts.”

  “See, I’ve got the face-plant part down, but not the triathlon part.” He points at his plate, with its puddle of burger grease and mountain of undercooked fries.

  “Oh, stop it, you’re torturing me.” Rita smiles. “Honestly, you look good, considering. Have you lost weight?”

  “It’s the bereavement diet,” he says. “I wouldn’t recommend it to your clients.”

  Rita stares at him for a second, then throws her head back and laughs. “You should try boxing. It’s great for venting aggression.”

  “Aggression? I’m the least aggressive person I know. Ask anyone.” He eats another fry, smiling.

  She studies him. “Everyone’s aggressive. You should see me in the morning before I have my coffee. My kids clear out of the room the second I walk in it.” She wipes off the food clinging to her lips. “Anyway. I’m guessing that you didn’t summon me on a Saturday because you wanted fitness tips?”

  Jonathan pushes a canvas bag across the table. “I’m finally clearing out Billie’s closet, and I came across some things that I thought you might like. Some equipment you might be able to use. A few mementos—hiking maps, that kind of thing.”

  Rita touches his hand with her fingertips and squeezes her eyes shut. Her face sparkles with some kind of glittery eye shadow that has fallen down from her eyelids to dust the top of her cheeks.

  Jonathan continues, “And I also wanted to thank you for all the things you did for her while she was alive.” He swallows, his throat gone dry. “I think she enjoyed the way you kept her on her toes. No one else really did that.”

  “Billie always liked to be surprised.” Rita smiles, remembering. “I wish we’d been able to spend more time together.”

  “More?” He pokes at his burger. “You saw her more than we did that last year. All those weekend trips you took.”

  Rita gives him a sharp look. Her fork stops halfway to her mouth, syrup slowly dripping down to the paper place mat. “What weekend trips?”

  “The hiking trip to Mount Shasta? The marathon in Mendocino…that weekend when you went backpacking in Yosemite…” He trails off as he registers the confusion on Rita’s face, and a single horrible thought flies into his mind: Oh shit.

  Rita carefully puts down her fork. “I’m not quite sure what you’re talking about. We didn’t go to Mount Shasta together. Or Yosemite. I do remember doing a half marathon with her a few months before she died. But that was local, in San Jose. We didn’t have to do an overnight trip for it.”

  A fleeting hope passes through him: Maybe he’s mixed up the trips or is remembering wrong. After all, it’s been a while. But dread starts to build as he fumbles in his pocket for his phone and puts it on the table, stabbing at the buttons with fingers that have gone numb. “Let me show you—all of those trips were in our shared calendar.” He pages back a year and then spins the phone toward her. “See? Here. And here. Shasta? Yosemite?”

  Rita leans over to examine the calendar, but she’s already shaking her head. “Truth is, that last year, she was bailing out on me a lot. We’d make plans and then she’d cancel them at the last minute. I know we talked about hiking up Mount Shasta, but believe me, it never happened.” She lifts her eyes and registers his distress, recoiling. “Oh shit. Me and my big mouth. I’m sorry.”

  “No need to be sorry, it’s not your fault.” He can barely get the words out as his growing horror slowly squeezes his vocal cords shut. It just doesn’t make sense. He tries to recalculate the facts, making them add up to something other than what they do, but he keeps landing back at the same unbearable conclusion. Billie was lying.

  Rita blinks across the table at him, her eggs forgotten. “I figured she was just burning out. She’d been going so strong. All that running and hiking and biking…it can take a real toll on your body. Sometimes it’s good to just take a break.” She sucks in her upper lip and chews on it. “So I assumed that was what was going on.”

  Jonathan shakes his head, his thoughts spinning in frantic circles. If Billie wasn’t with Rita, where was she? He looks down at his meal as if answers might be found in the congealing meat. When he looks up again, he can read in Rita’s eyes what she’s thinking, because it’s the same thing he is: Billie was having an affair. Why else would she lie about where she was?

  It’s impossible. Sure, they had their issues, after all those years of marriage (and he has a sudden little bump of guilt, remembering one particular lapse of judgment), but he never would have failed to notice a marital rift that big. Or would he? Because, judging by the missing weekends, he was clearly too blind to notice something. So what else did he miss? Christ. He mentally runs through every behavioral tic of Billie’s last year on earth, her restlessness all of a sudden interpretable in a whole different light. If it was an affair, with whom? That divorced dad, Zack Something, on the fundraising committee at Claremont Prep—he was always standing a little too close to her, maybe something was going on there? Or one of those fit backpackery types, someone she might have met on a hike or at a race. A Cal student seeking Mrs. Robinson. A dot-com billionaire. Who knows.

  The smell of bacon from his burger is nauseating; he slides his plate over to the next booth and then stares blankly at his hands spread-eagled on the table before him. They seem large, clumsy, useless.

  “Maybe she was going on those trips but just doing it alone and not telling anyone. She did that sometimes, right? I mean, that’s how she died, hiking alone…” Rita says. She’s looking m
ore stricken by the minute, as if all this is her fault.

  “Maybe that’s it,” he hears himself saying, as if by convincing Rita that this is true, he might convince himself. But he remembers it too clearly for there to be a mistake. He remembers Billie returning from her Mount Shasta weekend, sunburned and sticky. He remembers her dropping her backpack on the kitchen floor, downing a glass of water, and looking directly at him. “I beat Rita to the summit,” she said, and smiled. “We made a bet, so she had to carry my tent back down the mountain.”

  If Rita didn’t carry Billie’s tent back down the mountain, who did? Was there ever a mountain at all?

  —

  Back at home, Jonathan goes straight to the bedroom. He kneels on all fours and scrabbles around underneath his bed, casting aside dust bunnies. There it is, deep under the mattress where he shoved it a month after Billie’s death. Jonathan pulls it out carefully: a tote bag in tourmaline-blue leather, his gift to Billie on her fortieth birthday.

  Inside this, protected by a neoprene sleeve, her laptop.

  He climbs up on the bed and sits there, his back braced against the headboard, weighing the laptop’s titanium heft in his hands. His pulse races way too fast, making rational thought difficult. He thinks of his neat little love story in a thousand pieces on the floor. Where the Mountain Meets the Sky, 210 pages (so far) of connubial bliss with a tragic ending: Could he really have overlooked a major plot point in the third act?

  “This is a bad idea,” he whispers. Even if his wife was having an affair, what would it help him to know about it now? Why ruin his tender memories of her? (A more practical whisper: How will this fit in your memoir?)

  He plugs the computer in and powers it up, waiting for it to groan back to life.

  The keyboard is still smeared with the oils from Billie’s hands. Her sneeze marks spot the screen. The laptop hums softly as Billie’s start-up programs spring open one by one. Where to start? He already glanced through her laptop right after she died, retrieving any critical contacts and files, but he didn’t go much deeper than that. It seemed like a form of torture he didn’t want to face at the time.