“Where have you been?”
“Nowhere worth mentioning,” she said. She dropped the groceries on the counter and slid her arms around me. “Don’t be mad,” she said. “I just needed space to breathe. Which I deserved, you know. But I missed you two!” As if that were a sufficient explanation. And like the sucker I was, I let it be sufficient—because that was the answer I wanted to hear.
At the time, I didn’t directly connect the two events—the fight and Billie’s departure. And maybe the two events weren’t connected; maybe there was another reason she left us that weekend. Maybe she was having an affair even then. Maybe she did just need a little space for herself. But maybe, just maybe, the confrontation with Olive and me gave her an excuse she was looking for: evidence that we were aligning against her. A reason to leave.
Another truth I haven’t wanted to admit: As anxious and angry as I was about Billie’s disappearance, it was nice to have her gone. It was like coming out from under a shadow, feeling the light on your face again. Olive and I spent the weekend together, ice cream sundaes and the sci-fi films Billie would never, ever watch, reading books together in comfortable silence, ordering takeout. Solidifying our fledgling alliance with an unspoken understanding, that we two were more alike than we’d ever been given the space to realize.
And yet. That Sunday morning, when church time rolled around and I offered to drive Olive over to Natalie’s house, Olive hesitated. She looked around the room, as if her mother might have materialized behind the couch or in the doorway, and then down at her bare feet. “That’s OK, Dad,” she said softly. “I don’t really want to go after all.”
No wonder I pretended that Billie didn’t really leave us. I did it for Olive. I did it for me. I did it so that we could survive as a family, because Olive wanted us to.
CHERYL IS FIFTEEN MINUTES LATE to their meeting. Jonathan sits in the window of the café on College Avenue, just a few blocks from his house, nursing a coffee. A waitress with a Frida Kahlo hairstyle and a turquoise nose stud is wiping down the marble-topped tables in the wake of the lunchtime crowd. Three Chinese Cal students sit quietly in the back of the café, studying organic chemistry. Outside, a little boy on a Kickboard scooter whips back and forth past Jonathan’s window, from the Nepalese clothing boutique to the Italian gourmet grocery and back.
The appointment with Dr. Fishbein has left him queasy; the sight of his inert daughter sliding inside that grinding machine has liquefied something critical inside him. Even though the diagnosis is less terrifying than it could have been—temporal lobe epilepsy, it’s not great, but it’s also not (thank God) a tumor—he still doesn’t like to imagine his child’s vulnerable brain marred. It was prettier to let himself believe that something more magical was happening in her head, that she could really see things that he couldn’t. He should have known better. It was selfish of him to have indulged the fantasy: He stupidly spurred Olive into action instead of keeping her safe in the dark until he was sure there wasn’t a monster waiting behind the next door.
(And yet. Olive had picked up on something, hadn’t she? His brain seizes up whenever he considers this apparent conundrum.)
Ten more minutes pass. He orders another coffee and checks his ipTracer app: 0 visitors, not a single hit yet, despite three more days and four more chapters. The dark memories are spilling out of him now like a previously undetected cancer that’s metastasized: Writing them down makes him feel sick, yet he can’t seem to stop, even though it appears that no one is paying attention. He is starting to think Calvin Lim has sent him on a fool’s errand; maybe he warned Billie in advance to avoid vanity Google searches.
He checks his watch again. Cheryl is a half hour late. He is about to give up and leave when a woman rushes through the door, slamming a voluminous battered purse into the doorjamb and ricocheting back off it. She looks around with embarrassment, makes eye contact with Jonathan, and then teeters toward him, falling into a chair across from him.
“Jonathan, right? Sorry I’m late, I forgot to put the dog out this morning and he vomited all over the carpet and I had to clean it up before I left?” She rifles around in the purse, looking for something. “And then I didn’t have any change for the meter, I had to ask someone, and I’m pretty sure they didn’t give me the right amount—” She opens a fist and stares at the coins lying there with bafflement; then looks directly at him, her eyes wide. “Oh! You’re handsome, aren’t you? Not that I’m surprised about that. Sybilla always got the cute guys.”
He feels like he has whiplash. “Can I get you a tea?”
“No, no! You don’t have to do that, I can get it myself.” She spins back out of the chair and heads to the espresso bar, scattering spare change beneath her feet.
He watches her go. Cheryl is tall, but she tips forward when she walks, as if someone is giving her a little push from behind. A ponytail sprouts from the back of her head, a blond stalk rooted with several centimeters of gray-threaded brown. She wears pink leggings and UGGs and a mumsy cardigan sweater, but as she pays for her tea, Jonathan can see tattoo sleeves covering her wrists. A constellation of wilting holes decorates her earlobe, from oversize studs that have long been removed. She was probably pretty once, but a road map of wrinkles marks the route of some hard-living years.
“So you saw my ad in the Chronicle?” he asks when she sits down again. “I’m amazed anyone reads the print edition anymore, let alone the classifieds.”
She stirs a heaping spoonful of sugar into her tea. “Oh, I don’t read the paper. I work part-time as a pet groomer, and we use newspaper to line the cages. It happened to catch my eye, you know? Her name jumped out at me?”
“And here I thought you were a sign that newsprint had a viable future.” She gives him a baffled look. “Forget it.”
“Can I see a picture? Of Sybilla?”
Jonathan pulls one up on his phone, a snap of Billie and Olive taken a few summers earlier. Their two faces side by side, Olive’s a faint echo of her mother’s, their hair loose and eyes squinting in the sun. “With our daughter,” he offers.
Cheryl grabs his wrist to pull the phone closer to her face. She stares at it for a long time, silently. “Wow. Wouldn’t have thought she’d end up one of those yoga-mommy types.”
“Yoga wasn’t really her thing, actually,” he says. Cheryl is still gripping his wrist, pinning him uncomfortably in place.
“Oh, don’t get me wrong, I love yoga, I would do it if I had the time. God knows I need it, twin nine-year-old boys, I could use a little more Zen in my life. Haw! Haw! My husband would probably freak out, though, he thinks it’s all too culty. We met in AA, you want to talk culty, but whatever.” She releases his wrist. “I’m blabbering too much, aren’t I? Shit, I’m sorry. I do that when I’m nervous.”
He massages his wrist under the table. “So, about Billie?”
“Billie.” She says the name slowly, letting the L’s roll languorously off her tongue. “Funny, no one called her anything but Sybilla back then. She hated nicknames.”
She told me she hated the name Sybilla, he remembers. He tries to remain neutral: an objective journalist, collecting facts about his subject. Start at zero, build a picture, see if it matches the one you already had in your head. “Tell me more,” he says. “What was she like back then?”
Cheryl blows across her tea to cool it. “Oh,” she says. “I was hoping you could tell me about her. How she did in life.” She looks around her, at the marble-topped café tables and the signboards advertising sixteen-dollar salads; at Jonathan’s button-down shirt and the laptop tucked into the leather bag at his feet. “She did well, didn’t she? I always knew she would. She had that thing, you know?”
He takes a careful sip of coffee. “What thing?”
“You know. She was the girl everyone wanted to be. Or be around.” Cheryl casts her eyes aside, smiling to herself. “She and I, we were the pretty ones in our class, right? Strolling through that school like we owned the place. I have a pi
cture, if you want to see it? From sophomore year of high school.” Cheryl reaches into her purse, rummages around, and pulls out a snapshot, discolored with age, of two pretty, big-haired teenagers: bangs sticky with aerosol hair products, eyes popping with neon eye shadow, jeans tight as Saran Wrap around slim thighs. They’re sitting on a curb, feet folded into the gutter. The blond one, Cheryl, is splayed across the brunette’s lap, laughing; the brunette is holding a cigarette over her friend’s head, an ash in danger of igniting all that hairspray, and looking at the camera with a bemused, tolerant expression, as if she’s waiting for all this to end. It’s Billie, but not a version of her that he’s ever seen. He stares at it.
“We were the bomb, right? Except what Sybilla had that no one else did—definitely not me—was that she was cool. As in cucumber. She didn’t get worked up about regular shit the way the rest of us did. You know, she got voted to homecoming court? And she didn’t even show up for the dance. She was already on to bigger and better things.”
“Like what?” He tries to imagine.
“Like anything.” Cheryl exhales hard. “She liked being ahead of the curve. Older guys, obscure music. Things she’d read. She’d study something, get all intense about it, and then get bored and move on to something else.” She pauses. “You have to understand where we came from. It was nothing. Farms and churches, migrant workers and struggling families; and nothing to do on the weekends but drive two towns over to hang out in the parking lot of a Stop and Shop.”
“I’ve been to Meacham,” Jonathan says, thinking of the dilapidated farmhouse collapsing into the earth.
“So you know. Sybilla’s dad was kind of a big deal in town back in the day, preacher at the Episcopal church everyone went to.” She looks down at her hands, fingernails chopped pragmatically short. “Her parents were pretty tough on her; they would have locked her up until she got married if they could have.”
“Didn’t they?” he asks, catching the edges of Cheryl’s story and making them meet up with the one he’s already familiar with. “In the basement.”
She looks up with a confused expression. “The rumpus room? We used to get stoned down there. But I mean, yeah, they were strict. They’d punish her by making her copy out Bible verses freehand. Her father didn’t let her wear short skirts or go on dates or listen to the music she liked, so she was always sneaking around behind their backs. She just loved pulling one over on them.” Cheryl takes a gulp from her tea, winces at the heat, and sets it down, leaving a coral lip print smeared across the rim of the cup. “Starting our junior year, she told her parents she’d joined an after-school Bible study group, and she and I started hitchhiking in to Bakersfield and hanging out at the mall. Slim pickings, but that was the best we could do. Her parents found out eventually, and they grounded her.”
“Can you tell me about when she ran away?”
She tilts her head. “Which time?”
This is jarring. “She did it more than once?”
Cheryl reaches down and fishes in her purse and pulls out an electronic cigarette. “Sorry, talking about the past really makes me need a cigarette. Don’t worry”—she waves away the Frida Kahlo waitress, who is immediately by her side with a disapproving expression—“I’m not going to smoke it, sometimes it helps just to hold it, OK?” She rolls it between her fingers. Back and forth. “So. Sybilla did not like being grounded. But this is the thing about Sybilla—she never got hysterical, you know? She just got focused, all intense. So one day she comes up to me in school and drags me into the bathroom and says, all serious-like, ‘I’m going to run away.’ And she’s not just saying it. She means it.” The cigarette slides back and forth, back and forth. “I talked her into taking me with her. We just packed some stuff and slipped out the back door of school and jumped a bus to Los Angeles.” She laughs: Haw! Haw! “Turned out that Sybilla had been stealing money from the collection plate at her dad’s church for years. She had a whole stash of cash. She called it her fuck-off money.”
Jonathan thinks of the missing weekly withdrawals from his own bank account, seeing patterns play out across decades. Fuck-off money. “Yeah, sounds like Billie,” he mutters.
Cheryl shoots him a quizzical look. “Anyway, we checked into a cheapo motel in Los Angeles, and for ten days, we totally lived it up, partied on Hollywood Boulevard. Sybilla met this guy at a party we went to. And then one day there was a knock on the hotel door and my parents were there.” She blinks, remembering. “See, Sybilla had warned me that we needed to pick new names—she was going to be Elizabeth, and I was Laura—but I forgot and booked the motel room in my real name, and I guess our parents called around until they found us. Sybilla was so pissed at me. We got dragged back to Meacham, and that was pretty much the end. Her parents decided they were going to send her off to some Bible school for wayward girls.”
Jonathan takes another sip of his coffee, now cold. Billie had never told him this part of the story. “But they didn’t end up sending her,” he says.
She gulps at her tea. “No. She took off again before that happened. And her parents never found her.” She makes a strangling sound and stares into her empty cup. Jonathan notices that the tips of her fingers on the table are vibrating.
“That must have been hard on you,” he says.
Cheryl looks up at him with big wounded eyes. “She left me behind, see? She thought I was too much trouble. She didn’t think I was worth it.” She takes a ragged breath. “Anyway. That’s the story.”
Jonathan nods, assembling all the moving pieces in his mind. Though it’s not exactly how he imagined Billie’s childhood, it’s not a radical departure. But what was he expecting, anyway? Another person’s past spreads out like a vast sea, impossible to grasp in its entirety; all you get is brief glimpses of the things hidden down in its depths, the things you drag up one by one to examine before throwing everything back.
Then he remembers something else. “Sorry to pry, but…Billie told me that her father got in trouble for sexually assaulting one of her friends. Was that you?”
The e-cigarette slips out of Cheryl’s fingers and clatters to the floor. She drops to her knees, scrabbling around under her chair. When she sits back up, she doesn’t meet his eyes but instead stares at the e-cigarette. “Yeah,” she says. “That was her idea.”
He puts the coffee cup down too fast, and it slips in the saucer and spills the tepid remains across the table. He dabs at the spill with a napkin. “Excuse me? Billie’s idea?”
Cheryl pushes up her sleeve and scratches nervously at the tattoo on one arm, running a fingernail up and down the belly of a belligerent Japanese koi. “After they dragged her back from L.A. She was furious that her dad was going to ship her off to Wings of Faith, or whatever that school was called,” she says. “So it was, like, revenge, right? She said I should go to his office in the church and cry a little bit, tell him I wanted to repent for my sins and then go sit in his lap and see what happened. Just to freak him out, she said.” Cheryl goes quiet. “And she was already pissed at me for the L.A. thing, and I didn’t want to disappoint her anymore, so yeah. I did it.”
Jonathan’s cellphone begins to ring, but he quickly mutes it, flipping it on its face. “You just—sat in his lap.”
“Yeah.” Cheryl folds the cigarette into her palm, like a magic trick, and then opens it again. She stares at it dolefully, as if she expected it to disappear. “I mean, it was the way I sat. I think Sybilla must have known something about her dad that she didn’t tell me. Because when I did it, when I slid into his lap and put an arm around his neck, he didn’t act freaked out or upset. He got pretty…excited. And then, suddenly, he had one hand up my skirt and the other inside my blouse and I didn’t know what the hell to do. Like, did Sybilla want me to keep going or stop? You know? But then a church deacon came racing through the door and saw us. And yeah, you can guess the rest. Huge scandal. Her dad was pretty much destroyed. I mean, I was barely sixteen.” She pauses. “I always wondered if Sybilla s
ent that deacon in to get her dad in trouble. Never got a chance to ask her, because right after all this went down, that’s when she disappeared.”
“Jesus.” His voice is too loud, and it echoes off the marble tabletops, the tile floor, the wall of glass. A few tables down, one of the studying students looks up and frowns, showily flips a page in her textbook. He lowers his voice. “I’m so sorry.”
Cheryl sits up straighter. “Oh, it’s OK,” she says cheerfully. “I mean, it screwed me up for a long time. But I got my life together now, right? Got a husband, two kids who aren’t always complete monsters, a good enough job. Haven’t had a drink in ten years. I did all right. I don’t blame her for anything.”
You should, he thinks. He feels disoriented: These are Billie’s life legends, the familiar stories she always told about herself. He realizes now that someone else was telling the exact same stories her entire life, but in a wholly different way. Perhaps both versions equally true to their tellers. So which one should he believe?
He is momentarily distracted by a familiar silhouette walking along College Avenue, a blazer he recognizes, the sluggish gait from a too-heavy backpack. Is that Olive? He picks up his phone and glances at the time. Is his daughter cutting class again? He notices that the phone call he missed was from the front office of Claremont Prep.
He lifts his hand to rap on the window and hesitates, reconsidering the scenario, just as Olive passes the café and notices him sitting there. There is an uncomfortable moment as they stare at each other through the glass, each waiting for the other to do something. Olive looks at Cheryl, back at Jonathan, and then back at Cheryl. She turns around and walks back to the door of the café.
“Sorry,” he says to Cheryl. “That’s my daughter. I think she’s cutting school.”
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