Watch Me Disappear

by Janelle Brown

  Flummoxed, Olive looks at her father with raised eyebrows. How am I supposed to respond to that?

  “I’m sorry your necklace is missing, Mrs. Thrace.” Jonathan leans in close to the old lady, placing a gentle hand on her knee. “We’ll find it later. But, Mrs. Thrace—Rose—did you hear me? This is your granddaughter, Olive.”

  Rose looks down at the hand on her knee. She tries to move her leg out from underneath. “That’s not my granddaughter,” she says weakly as Jonathan pulls his hand back. She calls out to the nurse in a cracking voice. “God sees everything!”

  The nurse makes a huffing sound but keeps her back turned. Jonathan and Olive exchange glances, and Jonathan shrugs, his eyes telegraphing a lack of concern that Olive can’t quite match. Is no one else bothered by what the old lady is saying? Is this normal?

  “Rose, did your daughter come to visit you?” Olive watches her father’s eyes scan Rose’s face, waiting for a reaction. Her grandmother’s torso rises and falls from the exertion of shouting at the nurse, but she says nothing.

  Olive can see the struggle in her father’s face: the impulse to be kind, battling his impatience with Rose’s bigoted senility. “Look, I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but Billie”—he hesitates, thinking—“I mean, Sybilla—she’s dead.”

  Rose swings her face back at them, finally looking directly at Olive. For a moment she appears frightened and lost, as if she might cry. “Sybilla,” she says, her tongue tangling up in the name. Her watery eyes fix on Olive’s, and her hand darts forward to grasp Olive’s forearm. “You came back.” She lowers her voice to a whisper: “I don’t want God to punish you.”

  Olive is afraid to pull her arm away. “Don’t worry—” she begins.

  But Rose interrupts her. “You have to ask God’s forgiveness!” She tries to stand up, and the force of her effort causes the wheelchair to jerk back and forth in impotent semicircles. “We’ll pray! I can save you! It’s not too late!”

  The nurse is now making her way across the room as Olive, standing, begins to back away. Her father, also upright, presses Olive protectively behind him with the flat of his hand, as if Rose is capable of launching herself from her seat and forcing Olive to her knees. “That’s really not necessary, Rose,” he says, the gentle quality gone from his voice.

  The nurse, her comforting bulk smelling like lemon soap, passes between them. She grabs the handles of Rose’s chair, pushing her back toward the window. “Now, Rosie,” she chides, “these nice people came to visit you. I don’t think you want to be saying things like that to them, do you? I’m sure God doesn’t think they need saving right now.”

  Rose looks up at the nurse helplessly. “Give me back my cross,” she mutters, but the spark of life inside her has dimmed again. She drops her head to the right so that, once more, she’s looking at the paper skeleton. It leers back at her, doffing its top hat in a mockery of respect.

  The nurse escorts them to the facility entrance. Olive notices that her scrubs are decorated in goggle-eyed cartoon frogs, as if she is working in a pediatric unit, which makes Olive feel marginally better. The name tag over her heart reads MARGARETA.

  “Sorry about that,” Margareta offers. “She raves like that a lot. Religious mania. It’s pretty common with dementia, you know, a fixation on God and punishment.” She wrinkles her nose. “ ’Course, all the Jesus stuff just drives the other residents away. And visitors, too, I suppose. Rose doesn’t really get any.”

  “No one comes to visit her?” Olive finds this tremendously sad—does her grandmother really have no one? How awful to end your life like this, unloved and alone, even your happiest memories stripped away from you by a failing brain. A swell of pity makes her look back at Rose, who has fixed her eyes on the television set, where a transgender actress is giving makeup tips.

  The nurse frowns. “Well. There’s one woman who’s come round—a relative, I have to assume. But she’s only visited once, a couple months back. And she didn’t stay long, either. Went to see Rose in her room and bolted a few minutes later.”

  Olive watches her father draw his cellphone out of his pocket and turn it so the nurse can see. It’s a photograph of Billie and Olive on his home screen, taken on vacation a few years back, smiling by a swimming pool. “This woman, by chance?” he asks, jabbing his finger at Billie’s face.

  The nurse examines the photo. “Gosh. It’s been a while, obviously, but— Yes. Sure looks like her.”

  Olive looks at her father; he looks back at her with his eyebrows knitted together, as if doing some complicated computation. Olive’s own mind feels liquid, all the conflicting details too slippery to grasp. It’s what she wanted to hear, isn’t it? That her mom might have been spotted alive? And yet the meaning of this—that Billie might have come to visit the mother she supposedly hated, but not her daughter and husband—makes Olive ill. She looks at a plastic jack-o’-lantern sitting on a side table, its mouth painted in a shocked O of surprise, and wishes they hadn’t come here.

  “Do you have a record of the people who come to visit?” her father is asking.

  “Sure, but we’re not allowed to show you,” the nurse replies. She uses her thumb to push the tiny hairs around her hairline back into place. “This place has bureaucracy like you wouldn’t believe. And I thought the hospital where I worked was bad. Government-run is the pits.”

  Jonathan writes his email address on a piece of paper and thrusts it into the nurse’s hand. “Look. I don’t want to get you in trouble. But we’d really like to know the name of Rose’s other visitor. And the date she visited, if that’s possible. We’re trying to locate”—he glances at Olive—“a missing person, and this would be a huge help.”

  The nurse holds the paper with the tips of her fingers. “Well, I don’t have access to front-office files. I’m a floor attendant.” She looks back up at them. “I suppose I could ask around,” she says.

  Jonathan grips Olive’s shoulder as they leave the nursing home. “Don’t get too excited,” he says softly. “There’s a reason they say that eyewitness identification is unreliable: People are suggestible. Memory is a reconstruction, not a record; that’s one of the first things you learn in journalism school. So unless we get a name, that woman could have been anyone. We don’t know it was your mother.”

  Olive nods, not sure how to feel about this. On the way to the car, she glances back at the nursing home. The glare of the sun off the asphalt parking lot has faded the front of the monolithic two-story stucco building to an indeterminate greige. The windows are coated with reflective film that makes it impossible to see what’s going on inside. Olive wonders if this is by design, so that passersby won’t be forced to make inconvenient eye contact with the dying.

  But one pane on the left side of the building has lost its film. Through the triangle of exposed glass, Olive can see her grandmother, in her perch by the window. She could swear that Rose is looking right at her and crying.

  So maybe that psychologist wasn’t right about love being something that can be manufactured between any two people. And maybe love isn’t magical, either. Maybe love comes down to your issues aligning with someone else’s, tongue into groove. Your neuroses, all that baggage from your past, somehow the perfect match to theirs: You need someone to take care of, and they need to be taken care of. You long for someone creative, they need someone stable. And so forth.

  If that’s the case, then the reason why I fell in love with Billie probably starts with Jenny. My sister.

  Jenny was the one who suggested we sneak into the neighbors’ pool. It was an oppressive summer day, heavy with Midwestern humidity, and our own shrubby backyard provided no relief from the sun. Our mother had forbidden us to leave the house while she was off doing the shopping—Jenny was ten, I was eight, and we were only just allowed to stay at home alone. After a half hour of playing listlessly with our Atari with a fan positioned at our feet, my sister suddenly lifted her head.

  “Let’s go swimming,” she
said.

  “Now? Where?” I asked.

  “The Wilsons’.” She was already standing at the window on her tiptoes, peering out over the hedge into the yard of our neighbors, whose crystalline blue pool had remained woefully unused all summer. “They’re both at work, they’ll never know.”

  My sister had always been the scrappy one, her knees scabby from her skateboard and her report card filled with admonishments from her teachers; whereas I was the good kid, bookish, rule-bound, depressingly dutiful. “I’m glad you know better than that,” my mother would whisper to me when my sister came home with yet another bloody nose from a fight at school; but sitting in my room, with only books and my Star Wars action figures for company, I wasn’t sure that this was really true. Jenny always seemed to be deeply immersed in life, whereas I was skating along the edge, dipping my toe in.

  So that day, I followed her into the Wilsons’ yard, clambering over the ornamental hedge, which scraped our shins raw. We left our shorts on the lounge chairs and danced across the hot concrete, jumping into the water in our underwear and T-shirts. The water so cold that it felt like a slap, leaving us breathless and laughing; the sun beating down mercilessly on our faces when we burst up through the surface, spraying diamond droplets in every direction. It was one of those moments when you know what it really means to be alive, to have every cell in your body attuned to the astonishing fact of your existence.

  “This is amazing,” I called to my sister.

  “Hell yeah,” Jenny replied.

  I’ll always remember my sister the way she looked as she climbed out of the pool: her cropped blond hair a shiny cap against her head, the soaked T-shirt clinging to the boyish planes of her chest, her face shining with happiness. She walked back toward the hedge, crouched down like a sprinter. “Double backflip,” she announced, and then broke into a run, her knees flying, feet akimbo. She was on the steaming concrete and then her toes were gripping the tile edge of the pool and then she was impossibly high in the air and then she was deep under the water and she wasn’t coming up. Or, rather, she was coming up, but in a very strange way: upside down, her limbs floppy, her short hair drifting aimlessly around her head.

  Dead man’s float, I told myself, waiting for her to stop joking around, and yet something looked wrong. “Stop it,” I said out loud from where I sat frozen on the steps of the pool. “Stop it, Jenny, stop it.” I kept saying this to myself, over and over, as if when I’d said it enough times Jenny would finally roll over and laugh at me, Such a scaredy-cat, such a sucker, get your nose out of a book and get a life.

  Even once I knew for sure that something was terribly, terribly wrong, I still sat there, paralyzed. Thinking, I have to call 911 no I have to swim in and rescue her I’ll do the Heimlich no CPR which one is it I don’t know how anyway I have to call Dad at the office he’ll know what to do no he’ll know we broke into the neighbors’ and we’ll get in trouble no that doesn’t matter. It was probably only a matter of seconds, and yet it felt an eternity had passed before I thrashed my way into the water, spluttering through my tears, and tugged my sister’s horrifyingly leaden body to the steps, propping her there half out of the water. I whacked at her back with the flat of my hand, tried to breathe into her lungs; but her empty eyes told me that it was already too late.

  And yet I kept shouting Stop it Jenny stop it as I scrambled back over the hedge to call 911, this time getting a nasty gash on my thigh that would go unnoticed in the days to come and would ultimately fester before it was treated, leaving a faint scar that I can’t bear to look at even as an adult.

  No one blamed me; no one except myself. “Your sister was older, she was the one in charge,” my father said as he sat on the edge of my bed, his red eyes the only clue to his own swallowed grief. “Even if you had known CPR, it wouldn’t have helped. She broke her neck, the doctors said it was instantaneous.” But I knew he was wrong; I knew that those crucial seconds when I sat there, useless, had to mean something. And even earlier than that: I was supposed to be the smart one, the responsible one, I should have cut Jenny off when she came up with the idea in the first place. I knew better than that.

  In the years that followed, I tried to make up for the death of my sister by being even better behaved, as if doubling my achievements might somehow mask the loss of an entire child. I learned how to be charming and funny, so I could make my parents smile again. I became editor of my high school newspaper, graduated at the top of my class, went to Stanford, got a job in Silicon Valley. Dated a string of nice girls with admirable résumés. He must be a real consolation to them, I could hear the neighbors whisper, but I secretly knew that I was no consolation at all.

  So was it any surprise when, at age twenty-six, I met a woman who reminded me of my dead older sister, all grown up—living on the sharp edge of convention, self-assured down to the bone—that I would thrill to her? That I would leap to make up for all my past failings? To protect her, sacrifice myself to her, think that by doing so I was somehow being noble?

  Maybe it was inevitable that I would fall for Billie. Maybe it was inevitable that I would willfully ignore all her faults. Only someone fearful of his own ordinariness would buy, so unquestioningly, someone else’s extraordinariness.

  Maybe this is why they say love is blind: Who you want people to be makes you blind to who they really are.

  WHEN HE STARTED at Decode, just out of Stanford, Jonathan hung his favorite Graham Greene quote over his desk: A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. The job of a writer, he’d learned over time, was not to try to tell a story in its entirety, but to tell an inevitably abbreviated version in the most interesting way one could. Giving shape and direction to something otherwise formless and elastic. Cause and effect. Action and reaction. Lede and kicker.

  The story line of his life with Billie: Where did it truly begin? Was it at the moment when she climbed aboard the J Church and made a beeline for the seat next to him; the moment she turned and made an inaudible comment about the weather? Or did their story together actually start years earlier, when his sister drowned and the trajectory of his life permanently shifted? Or earlier even than that, perhaps as early as the moment he was born, when the twin forces of nature and nurture started forming a path before him that would eventually lead him straight to his future wife?

  Or would a more accurate version of their life story now begin at the very end? Or what, at the time, he thought was the end of the Billie-and-Jonathan narrative: Billie’s memorial service, four hundred friends and relatives jammed into the auditorium of a yoga center rented out for the day, Olive’s hand clenched tightly in his own, his body shaky and sweating as if he were going through some kind of opiate withdrawal. He believed until recently that this was going to be the closing scene of Where the Mountain Meets the Sky, a hell of a kicker; but now he wonders, thanks to the facts that have come to light, if it should be his lede.

  How many times can he write and rewrite the story of his life with Billie before he’ll know what was really true?

  Jonathan sits at the desk in his home office, blinds closed against the light of a fairly pleasant Monday morning. Three fingers of bourbon in a glass next to him; a buzz on from the four fingers he’s already consumed. Peering at his laptop, the empty cursor blinking on a blank blog template: his IP address trap awaiting its latest entry.

  Setting up the IP address trap has turned out to be Internet 101 kind of stuff: The “trap” is simply a blog enhanced with a free Web server log analysis program called ipTracer, which captures the IP address of every visitor to the site. As for the content of the blog—the “memories of Billie” that Calvin Lim suggested—that was even easier. He already has hundreds of pages written about his wife, and more coming every day; although the tenor of his latest pages has shifted dramatically, to something darker and far less adulatory.

  He takes a fortifying slug of bourbon and begins
to type a new section.

  When Olive turned eight, Billie and I took her to Six Flags Marine World for her birthday, which turned out to be a mistake for many reasons (the resigned elephants in their concrete enclosures; the roller coasters that Olive was too small to ride; the hour-long lines for the dolphin show). Not long after Olive barfed up a funnel cake, she vanished entirely. Billie and I were distracted, burnt out, bickering, cleaning the vomit off our tennis shoes, and studying the map for the quickest routes to the exit, and when we looked up, our daughter was gone.

  I panicked. There was water all around us, and I thought instantly of Jenny. I started running in circles, hollering Olive’s name. Flailing about in the bushes, throwing aside trash cans. I accosted some kid in a Six Flags uniform, probably all of eighteen years old, and demanded that he DO SOMETHING NOW OUR DAUGHTER MAY BE DROWNING.

  I was about to take off my tennis shoes and dive into the murky water of Seal Cove when I heard Billie’s voice over a loudspeaker. I turned, and there Billie was, standing on the roof of the root beer float stand, holding a megaphone that she’d commandeered from a passing tram driver. God knows how she’d gotten up there.

  “Olive,” she said, her voice so loud and urgent that the flamingos in their lagoon rose as one and flapped their wings. “Bean. Please come out. We aren’t mad at you, OK? We love you. Show us where you’re hiding.”

  All across the area, people came to a stop. Like me, they couldn’t help but stare at my wife up there on the roof, her dark hair flying in wild glory, the setting sun behind her almost blinding. So calm, so magnetic, so sure of herself. A moment later, Olive came creeping out from behind the barricades by Monsoon Falls, tears clinging to the sugar smears on her face. She looked at her mother making her way down from the concession stand, and then ran to me and threw herself into my arms.