Watch Me Disappear

by Janelle Brown

  Now he takes a look at the chaotic mess of her desktop. Every square inch is cluttered with folders and files, tiled so thickly on the screen that they overlap at the edges. He starts with the abyss of Billie’s email program, an archive that runs 681MB deep. He types in Shasta, then Yosemite, to see if anything pops up. Nothing does. He doesn’t see any unfamiliar male names cluttering her inbox, at least not on a quick glance. Her address book runs to more than two thousand entries; he clicks through a few pages, then gives up.

  What else? His wife always shunned social media—“I just don’t see why everyone needs to know my business”—so there’s no Facebook profile or Instagram feed through which he might pore in search of mysterious strangers’ comments. Instead, he clicks over to her calendar. There they are, the trips in question: Shasta, Yosemite, Mendocino, and a few others he made Rita identify before he left the diner. But her calendar yields nothing else that adds clarity, no secret initials or private notations.

  It should be reassuring, but it’s not. He can’t shake this crawling sensation: There’s something you’re missing.

  He considers the files and folders scattered across her desktop. Her laptop’s memory is maxed out, each digital crevasse crammed with the ephemera of Billie’s day-to-day existence: family photos, work designs, a lifetime’s worth of MP3s, plus hundreds of trail maps, recipes, long-forgotten grocery lists, recommendation letters for old babysitters, an eleven-year-old workbook for online traffic school. He clicks around helplessly, not even sure what he is searching for. It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack without knowing what a needle even looks like.

  He is about to give up and put the laptop away when he stumbles across the folder. It’s in the lower corner of her desktop, hidden underneath another folder labeled PLANETRX MOCK-UPS, easy to miss. The folder has an oddly cryptic, abbreviated label: RR. It is password-protected.

  Something inside his chest clenches. Nothing else on her laptop has been deemed worth hiding behind a protective wall, not even her email account. He looks at the history of the folder: created February 11, nine months before her death.

  He clicks and clicks and clicks at the folder, testing out passwords, but it refuses to let him in. And still he prods at it. Frustrated, he finally gives up, closing the lid of the laptop and tossing it on the bedside table. The computer knocks a book—Billie’s unfinished Tana French mystery—to the floor. The bookmark spills out.

  Jonathan picks up both book and bookmark. He flips through the novel in order to put the bookmark back, looking for some kind of indentation in the pages, a gap in the spine that might reveal the correct spot. And then he realizes what he’s doing. He hurls the book toward the line of bags sitting in front of the closet. It hits the one marked DISCARD and flops, pages bent, onto the carpet.

  Next to Jonathan, the light of the laptop’s electronic eye blinks slowly, in contrast with his own rapid breath, thrumming with promise of the secrets inside.

  THE TEMPERATURE GAUGE in her mother’s Subaru says that it’s fifty-two degrees out. A dismal day to be at the beach. Olive gazes out at the ocean, her face stinging with the salt whipped off the waves by the wind, her jeans heavy with the damp. A ceiling of clouds hangs so low that Olive thinks she might be able to insert her hand right up to the wrist and watch her fingers disappear. The ocean is steel gray, pissed off, huge and foamy.

  Natalie sits nearby on the closed-up lifeguard stand, a puffy parka wrapped around her, its hood yanked up over her ponytail; her hands are wrapped around a vanilla mocha latte that went cold ages ago. Olive can see her friend shivering from where she wanders along the low-tide line, collecting bits of trash. Olive’s cold, too, but she’s too wound up to feel it. She skirts the water, the sand coarse beneath her sneakers, tiny sand crabs scuttling out of her way. The air smells like eucalyptus and seaweed.

  At the far end of the beach are the tide pools. A man and his little boy are clambering across the rocks, bundled up in their parkas. The boy is poking anemones with his finger, and Olive can see the father crouching next to his son, pointing out starfish and sandcastle worms and clusters of acorn barnacles. The waves fling themselves against the rocks that the kid stands on, sending up fans of froth-flecked spray.

  At the other end of the beach, a giant rock shaped like an arch sits just off the shore, its base submerged in three feet of water. An old woman is walking her Labrador up and down the sand before it, throwing kelp bulbs into the waves for the dog to retrieve. The dog is old and limping and crusted with wet sand, but he plunges into the waves with his teeth bared in a sort of canine smile.

  Otherwise, the place is empty.

  It is the beach from her visions, isn’t it? It has to be. The last day trip that they took together as a family before Billie disappeared, the day they came to see the monarchs. Her mom cried when they watched the butterfly migration. Maybe there was some significance to her mother’s decision to come here that day; a reason that had drawn her mom back here, subconsciously or not.

  But today there are no butterflies—this year’s migration hasn’t arrived yet. The beach is deserted; not even the surfers are out. Olive and Natalie have been at the beach for two hours, but it took only half a minute to figure out that her mother isn’t here. She certainly isn’t standing on the edge of the sea in a filmy white dress, surrounded by butterflies, waiting for Olive to find her. Maybe it was naïve to think that bringing her mom home was going to be as easy as zipping down the Peninsula to Santa Cruz and picking her up; but OK, yeah, Olive had hoped. Would that have been any crazier than the other stuff that’s going on in her head?

  One thing is clear: If her visions are some sort of a mystical puzzle, she’s going to need more help interpreting the pieces.

  Natalie comes up behind her. “Hey,” she says. “I stole some fancy gin from my parents’ liquor cabinet. Want some?”

  Olive shakes her head, her tennis shoes sinking in the waterlogged sand. A Styrofoam cup washes in on a wave, and she pins it under her toe so that it won’t drift back out to sea. Next to her, Natalie steps right and then left, watching the impressions of her feet melt away. Olive worries that she’s disappointed; that she, like Olive, believed she was about to have a thrilling encounter with the paranormal. Olive feels like she’s let Natalie down.

  “You OK?” Natalie asks, peering into her face. “I know you were hoping that your mom would be here.”

  Olive turns to look at the breaking waves and the giant arch standing sentry over the sea, and for a moment she feels herself swell with the wonder of it all—the world is so vast and so beautiful and so forever—and then she remembers that she is supposed to be sad, too. How can she feel both of these things at once? The loveliness of being alive and the knowledge that it can never last? She feels like she has to let one drop in order to really examine the other one, and yet she isn’t sure which one she is supposed to let go of first.

  She closes her eyes and tries to see herself the way her mother might if she were watching right now: a tiny figure on a cold beach. Standing there with the mist lapping at her face, Olive thinks of the days when she was a kid and her mother manned the Snack Shack on Olive’s grammar school playground, lording over platters of home-baked treats. (Her mom’s Pinterest-worthy cupcakes—fondant ladybugs, green aliens with mini-marshmallow eyes—were always the first to sell out.) Olive would huddle with her friends in a corner of the playground, pretending to be embarrassed about her mother’s presence across the yard, but secretly proud that her mom was the most beautiful, the most creative, the most interesting of all the school moms.

  Whenever Olive peeked over at her mom with the plates of cupcakes, she would almost always catch Billie studying her. Just by the way her mom pursed her lips or tilted her head, Olive would know whether or not she approved of her behavior. She would find herself adjusting accordingly: walking away from the girls who giggled too much; shouting a little louder on the soccer field; climbing to the highest bar of the jungle gym. Because
as much as Olive wanted the other girls on the playground to like her, she wanted her mom to admire her even more. With her mom just over there, watching, guiding, Olive experienced a clarity that she didn’t when she was all alone.

  Her mother isn’t watching today. Olive can’t feel her here at all.

  “I’m fine,” Olive says now, pushing back her melancholy, grasping for the optimism she started out with this morning. “It’s just our first try, right?”

  Natalie puts her arm around Olive’s waist and leans her head on her shoulder. Her hair smells damp and honey-sweet. “This is why I’m a Hindu. They believe in immortality via reincarnation: You can never truly die. So even if your mom is dead—which I’m not saying that she is, but if she were—she’s still alive somewhere.”

  Olive doesn’t find this as comforting as Natalie wants it to be; nor does the doubt in her friend’s voice—even if your mom is dead—go unnoticed. “Since when are you a Hindu? Last I checked, you were Presbyterian.”

  Natalie pulls back. “Well, maybe not at the moment, but I reserve the right to be someday.”

  They watch the waves frothing at the base of the rock bridge. Natalie speaks again: “So, you ready to go home?”

  Olive reaches out and steals the bottle of gin from her friend’s hand. She takes a quick gulp that burns off a layer of her throat on the way down; fortified, she turns to regard a row of homes on the bluff above the beach. “No way,” she says, and points at the first house, a friendly-looking cedar-shingled bungalow with white trim and a picket fence politely keeping beachgoers from wandering onto the property. “Now we go up there and start asking around.”

  —

  Olive marches up the street, Natalie trailing slightly behind her, and through the gate of the shingled house. A faded sign, hand-painted with bumblebees and monarch butterflies, hangs from a nail by the front door: THE TEMPLETONS. Olive knocks firmly on the door and waits.

  A bespectacled elderly woman opens the door and peers at them. She’s wearing a fuzzy blue housecoat and purple old-lady slippers embroidered with flowers, and her eyes are enormous and rheumy behind thick prescription lenses. “Can I help you?” she asks.

  Olive holds out a photograph of her mother. “I’m sorry to bother you, ma’am. But my mother’s gone missing, and I think she may be in the area, and I’m wondering if you could tell me if you’ve seen her? Any time in the last year?”

  “Oh, how awful. Let me see,” the old lady clucks, and pulls Olive’s hand closer to examine the picture. Her hand is papery and porcelain-thin on Olive’s own. “I’m— Well, I’m not sure. It’s possible she looks familiar, but my eyes aren’t what they used to be.” She releases Olive’s hand. “People come and go around here. Tourists and vacation rentals; the faces change so much.” Mrs. Templeton grips the side of her door, slowly pushing it closed. “Well, then. Good luck.”

  “Thank you!” Olive calls as the door clicks shut. She turns to face Natalie. “I’m thinking it’s overly optimistic to chalk that one up as a maybe. We’ll say inconclusive.”

  Together, they walk down the street, knocking on doors. Most of the oceanfront houses are vacation homes, shuttered for the winter with blinds closed tightly against the light, like sleeping giants. Alarm-system signs bristle from the tiny gardens planted with juniper and ice plant and moss rose. Could her mother be hidden away in one of these homes? She imagines Billie befuddled with amnesia, being caretaken by a love-struck millionaire who has stashed her in his vacation home to recover her memories of her past life. (OK, yes, this does sound suspiciously like the plotline of a made-for-TV movie she recently watched; but wasn’t that supposedly based on a true story? So: possible!)

  Olive leads Natalie inland, away from the beach, where the immaculate waterfront rentals segue into a more motley collection of homes. These houses show signs of full-time occupancy—a sun-faded plastic tricycle on its side in the front yard; a garden hose trailing across a driveway; laundry drying in the wind. They knock and knock; whenever someone answers, Olive displays her picture. The people who live in the homes shake their heads and look uniformly befuddled. No, no idea. Never seen her. Couldn’t tell you. Maybe? Isn’t that the lady who works in the grocery? Oh, no, wait, maybe not. It’s all maddeningly useless.

  Afternoon gives way to evening. Olive picks up the pace. They stop at a green bungalow with surfboards pitched against its clapboard walls and wetsuits hanging like empty snakeskins from an upstairs balcony. The windows are hung over with tie-dyed bedsheets. Even from the street, Olive can smell the pot smoke emanating from the house. Natalie looks at her and raises an eyebrow.

  They pick their way up the driveway, past a rusting truck with a SnugTop capping the bed, and knock on the door. It swings open to reveal a young blond guy in torn sweatpants and three-day stubble, his blue eyes at half-mast.

  “Hey, look,” Sweatpants drawls, staring down at them. He puts a hand up against the doorjamb. “Please tell me you’re selling Girl Scout cookies? Because I could kill a box of Thin Mints right about now.”

  Next to her, Natalie lets loose a startled giggle, and Olive turns to stare at her in surprise. Her friend is tugging at her jacket with one hand, pulling it down over the waistband of her jeans, and smoothing back the frizz at her hairline with the other. Seriously, that? Olive feels betrayed. She looks back at Sweatpants, trying to see what Natalie clearly sees, the thing that is turning her feminist-minded, super-achieving friend into a ridiculous, self-effacing bubblehead. But all Olive sees is some dude, maybe kind of good-looking but nothing particularly special.

  It’s not like she’s never kissed a boy. There was a Berkeley High student named Isaac whom she met volunteering at the Berkeley Nature Conservation Network a while back. He was cute enough, and had a kind of nerd-cool Jew-fro thing going—he was smart, and funny, and safe-seeming—and really into her for some reason. So she went with him to a party and then let him kiss her, more out of curiosity than uncontrollable lust. She kept waiting for a rush of excitement, the promised amorous tingle, but the experience mostly reminded her of a trip to the dentist. As Isaac tongued her molars, Olive kept visualizing the slides of amoebas they were studying in her biology class—his germy pseudopods spelunking in her mouth.

  Olive knows that Natalie has kissed four boys, mostly guys she’s met at the sleepaway AcadaCamp where her parents send her every summer to hone her debating skills. She recently told Olive that she wanted to start going to more Berkeley High parties because she really wanted to lose her virginity before she went to college. “You know, knowledge is power, better to start out with that under my control,” she explained somewhat apologetically. Olive digested this statement unhappily, feeling a gulf open between them that she didn’t know how to cross.

  Sweatpants is now joined by a friend, also college-age, this one with a deep tan and long salt-damaged brown hair straggling down his back. He wears a faded shirt that reads DISCO BISCUITS across the front. A damp joint smolders between his fingers, slowly burning down. “How can we help you ladies?”

  Olive thrusts the picture under their noses. “I was wondering—have you seen this woman?”

  Disco Biscuit reaches out and grabs the photograph and peers at it closely. His eyes roam curiously across Olive’s mom’s face, and then his own pink-rimmed eyes light up. He turns the picture toward Sweatpants. “Check it out,” he says. “Could this be that chick, the one with the McTavish longboard? You know, the one who was getting cleaned up out at the Hook last month? You almost ran over her, remember?”

  Sweatpants steps back, trying to focus on the picture under his nose. “Nah. That’s not her. She’s blond. And her hair is short. She’s not, like, a mom.”

  “No, check it out.” Disco Biscuit puts his thumb over the top of Olive’s mom’s head. “Imagine her with different hair. Don’tcha think?”

  “You’re tripping, man.”

  Disco Biscuit is clinging to the photo, squinting at the picture with one eye closed and then the
other, as if he can’t figure out how to focus. “Why you need to find her?”

  “She’s my mom,” Olive says. Her heart rate has tripled. Her mom doesn’t surf—hadn’t surfed—but she would surf. It is a Billie Flanagan kind of thing to do. Could she have bleached her hair blond, too? Cut it off? Maybe she is in disguise, trying to disappear. But that just raises another, thornier question: disappear from whom?

  Disco Biscuit takes a step backward, tucking the joint behind his leg as if only now aware of it. “Well, if she’s who I think she is, she’s a local.” He points down toward the ocean. “I used to see her down at that break a lot, but not so much lately.”

  “If you see her again, will you call me?” Olive asks. She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a square of paper with her phone number inked on it, pushing it into Disco Biscuit’s hand. He stares smearily at Olive.

  “Your mom. Huh. What a bummer,” Sweatpants mutters. He hooks a thumb over his shoulder. “You want to come in? Get warm? Smoke a joint?”

  Next to her, Natalie starts to nod, but Olive reaches out and grabs her friend’s waist. She can feel Natalie twisting under her grasp. “No, thank you,” Olive says. “We’re on a mission.”

  “Your loss,” says Sweatpants. The two of them stand in the doorway, watching the girls head back down the driveway, Olive dragging Natalie by the fabric of her jacket. Natalie turns for one last wave over her shoulder—a silly, girlish flap—as the boys, leaden with stoned lethargy, watch them go.

  “Olive, honestly? It wouldn’t have killed us to take a little break,” Natalie complains as soon as they are out of earshot.

  “Can we just focus, please?” Olive eyes the houses on the block, trying to decide which one to tackle next. The Mediterranean villa? The Cape Cod? The light is starting to wane, the gray of the overhanging clouds fading slowly into a deeper gloom. “I want to hit up a few more houses.”