Watch Me Disappear

by Janelle Brown

  When she wakes up again, the house is silent. It’s somehow already midday. Her stomach growls, so she puts on her fuzzy slippers, wraps herself in an old bathrobe of her mom’s that she rescued from her father’s discard pile, and goes downstairs to the kitchen. She’s shaky and disoriented—maybe from hunger, maybe from Depakote—so she descends slowly, clutching at the railing to keep from falling over.

  As she reaches the bottom, she realizes that she’s not alone in the house after all: Her father is back; he’s in his office, opening and closing drawers. She walks down the hall in his direction.

  She swings the door open and stops, confused. Harmony sits at her father’s desk, her hand stuck deep in the back of a half-opened drawer. She starts at the sound of the squeaking hinge and turns, freezing when she sees Olive. They stare at each other for a few seconds before Harmony withdraws her hand.

  “Looking for a pencil.” She laughs, sweeping a chunk of blond hair from one shoulder to the other. “You two seem to have a boycott against them.”

  Olive points at the pencil jar on the top of the desk. “Take your pick,” she says.

  Harmony stares at the jar. “Oh gosh, I’m going blind,” she says. She selects one and sticks it behind her ear and then stands up. “Can I make you something? Cup of tea? Omelet?”

  Olive doesn’t move from the doorway. “Why are you here?” she asks pointedly.

  “Your dad had a meeting in the city,” Harmony says. “He asked me to stay and make sure you were OK. I’m not working today. I was just going to do the crossword.”

  “That’s not what I m—” Olive starts to say, but the words die in her throat as Harmony walks toward Olive. She stops when she’s inches away. Olive tips back, fearing a hug; she can smell Harmony’s body lotion, coconut, cloying.

  “Olive, look. I don’t want this to be awkward between us. I know you miss your mom; we all do. I know this—him and me, together—may seem strange for you. But you have to cut your father a break. Your mom’s been dead a year now. We’re all just trying to find new paths toward happiness.”

  Mom’s not dead, Olive thinks instinctively, but the urgency of this belief already seems like a relic of a past lifetime. She can’t think of anything to say that doesn’t sound petulant or childish or insane. The Depakote has fuzzed her edges so that she can’t even remember why she felt the need to lash out at Harmony in the first place. Her mind is a muddle.

  Harmony blinks at Olive, waiting. Her lips are full and shiny, gloss bleeding out from the faint smile that plays across them; it’s the mouth of someone who spends a lot of time thinking about what goes in it. She reminds Olive of a custard, sweetly bland and inoffensively nice. Still, something about her makes Olive feel uneasy. Like she’s not as benign as she’s pretending she is.

  “Yeah, I’ll have an omelet,” Olive says, and turns and walks back upstairs to her bedroom.

  —

  The day inches by with excruciating slowness. Harmony brings an omelet to Olive’s room and then quietly, unceremoniously, leaves the house. Olive hears her car start in the driveway and then creeps downstairs to watch nature shows on the Discovery Channel. She can’t recall the last time she was home alone during the day. It’s so empty that her breath sounds like a hurricane.

  Natalie sends her a text at lunchtime—Why aren’t u at school???—but Olive doesn’t respond; Natalie’s question requires an answer that seems far too complicated for her to type out on the phone. She pushes the phone under the pillows of the couch and ignores its buzzing as she watches a show about Alaskan hunters who kill animals for their fur. She feels bad for the poor dead animals; and then she feels bad for the hunters, who are, after all, just trying to survive; and then she feels bad for herself most of all.

  At three, after Claremont Prep has gotten out for the day, Olive pulls a hoodie over her pajamas and digs the keys to the Subaru out of the drawer in the front hall. She drives herself to Natalie’s house, a few miles up into the Oakland Hills.

  Natalie lives in a two-story Tudor with timber frames and leaded glass, a tidy English garden in front, manicured ivy and roses. Wisteria creeps up the facing, a few last withered leaves clutching the vines. The plants have all been cut back for the winter, and the front grass smells like cow manure.

  She texts Natalie from the car, suddenly unsure of herself: U home? I’m here

  Why r u sitting outside my house in ur car, silly

  OK coming in

  Natalie meets her at the front door in skull-and-crossbones sweatpants and a T-shirt that reads THIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE. She is mid-manicure, waving her hands in the air to dry the polish. She steps aside to let Olive in. “You missed fetal pig dissection today,” Natalie says. “It was pretty cool, actually.”

  Olive shudders. “Not so cool for the poor pig.”

  “They give their life for a greater cause.” Natalie ushers Olive to her bedroom with a sweep of her arm. “Come into my boo-dwoir.”

  Natalie’s room looks like a Pinterest page, all throw pillows and drapery and framed art prints, a duvet cover with her initials monogrammed in purple, and an egg chair upholstered entirely in fake fur that Olive is pretty sure she saw listed for eighteen hundred dollars in a Restoration Hardware catalog. Natalie is doing her best to trash the place. There’s a big black footprint right in the middle of the duvet, a torn Bikini Kill poster Scotch-taped over the Monet print that Natalie’s mom hung there, dirty tights hanging off the top of the chair.

  Olive flops back on the bed and kicks off her shoes. Natalie curls up at the other end of the bed and resumes attacking her fingernails with a bottle of particularly hideous neon-orange polish.

  “We going to do anything for Halloween this year?” Natalie asks. “I was thinking I’d be Maleficent. Maybe you could be the Evil Queen from Snow White?” She squints, assessing Olive. “Though I don’t know if you’re capable of pulling off evil.”

  Olive thinks of the depressing pumpkins that are sitting uncarved on their front porch. “I’m boycotting Halloween this year.”

  “Too many ghosts in your life right now?” Natalie catches Olive’s wounded expression. “Wow, that was totally insensitive of me. Sorry.”

  “That’s OK,” Olive says. “It’s kind of true.”

  Natalie finishes her left hand and looks at Olive. “Want me to do your feet?”

  Olive nods, sitting up. Natalie picks up Olive’s right foot and plops it into her lap. Her hand, holding Olive’s heel, is cool and sure.

  “Stop giggling,” she says. “You’re going to make me mess up.”

  “It tickles,” Olive says.

  “Think about getting Odor Eaters? Your feet stink.” But Natalie keeps applying the polish in tiny strokes as Olive’s foot warms in her hand.

  “My toes look like they belong to someone else,” Olive says, staring at her orange nails. “Like a clown or a Japanese schoolgirl.”

  “Camouflage,” Natalie says. “It’ll help you blend in with the natives.”

  “Is that the goal? To blend in?”

  Natalie wrinkles her nose. “Depends on who you ask.” She furrows her brow and rubs at a smear of polish. “You’re not exactly disappearing these days, if that’s what you want to be doing.”

  “Who says I want to disappear?”

  Natalie gives her a long look. “So are you going to tell me what’s up your butt? You bailed out of school yesterday and then didn’t show up at all today and you didn’t even text me why. Mrs. Santiago is walking around wringing her hands like you’re dying of consumption in a Romantic novel. Ming thinks you just want attention.”

  “Oh, great.” Olive stares at a bug on Natalie’s ceiling, clinging upside down to the decorative molding. “I so don’t give a shit what Ming thinks.”

  Natalie makes a face. She examines her handiwork and then pushes Olive’s foot off her lap. “So are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

  “The Depakote that the doctor gave me made my visions stop,” she
says. “I can’t see my mom anymore.”

  Natalie frowns. “What does that mean?”

  “It means I’m not psychic after all. Just brain-damaged. Some kind of epileptic or whatever he called it. A mental case.” She says it flippantly, but the muscles around her mouth seem determined to tip downward; a fresh torrent of tears bursts forth from her eyes, and suddenly, she’s just a puddle of woe in the middle of her best friend’s bed.

  “Oh,” Natalie says, understanding. “Oh, shit.”

  She scoots closer to Olive, her still-wet fingernails leaving a sticky streak of orange polish across the duvet cover, and puts her arms around her.

  “You just ruined your bedspread,” Olive says, sobbing into Natalie’s shoulder. “It’s such a nice bedspread. Like a thousand thread count or something.”

  “I don’t give a crap about this hideous bedspread.” Natalie squeezes Olive tighter. She smells scalpy and sweet, like she didn’t shower after PE today. “Look. I know this sucks for you. But maybe it’s still possible that your mom is alive, even if she wasn’t actually communicating with you, like, clairvoyantly?”

  Olive shakes her head and sniffles. “We never really found anything conclusive.” A curl of Natalie’s hair ends up in her nostril, and she sneezes wetly. “Sorry. Now I got snot in your hair.”

  Natalie shrugs. “Doesn’t matter.” Olive pulls back a little to look at her. Natalie’s face is flushed and pink, the tip of her tongue probing the top of her lip. She takes Olive’s hand. “I wish I knew how to make you feel better.”

  Olive can feel Natalie’s heartbeat, hot and fast and pulsing, just below the surface of her skin. She is acutely aware of Natalie’s breath a few inches away from her face. She turns her own head, catching on to an electric thread, something sizzling and magnetic passing through her, and before she can stop herself, she presses her lips against Natalie’s.

  Natalie’s lips are smooth and surprisingly cool, like soft-serve ice cream on a hot day. Olive thinks she might pass out because her heart is beating so fast. In those fleeting few moments, a whole new future opens up before Olive, like a door opening to reveal a view whose existence she always suspected but could never quite see.

  I love you, she thinks. (But…oh shit, did she say that out loud?)

  And then Natalie lurches away, and there’s only empty air where her lips were a minute earlier. Olive is left hanging there in space, and she vainly wishes to freeze this moment in time, because she knows that in the next second everything is going to change forever and not for the better.

  “That’s not what I meant,” Natalie mumbles. She’s gone pale, her freckles flaming bright against her face. She scoots away until her back is against the headboard.

  “I’m sorry,” says Olive, as humiliation balloons inside her until it feels like it might burst through her skin. “I don’t know what that was about.”

  Natalie gives her a sideways look. “C’mon, Olive. Even I know what that was about. You’re a lesbian. Which, whatever, I figured that out a while ago. Totally cool, you know? Yay for rejecting heteronormativity. But, see, I’m not.”

  Olive imagines a needle pushed into her chest, pinning her to a display case, the label below her: LESBIAN. It doesn’t hurt, exactly. It’s more like something inside her is spilling out through the hole that’s opened up, and it’s kind of exciting and mind-boggling. Is it true? she asks herself. Is that what I am? But she can’t stop to answer this question, because the more pressing issue right now is the imminent loss of her best friend. Because despite what Natalie just said—Yay lesbian!—when Olive looks at her friend backed up against the headboard, it looks like she’s a million miles away.

  “Got it,” Olive says. “Anyway, I’ll go now.” She flings herself off the edge of the bed, almost falling over from a head rush of dizziness—the Depakote side effects kicking back in at the least opportune moment—and fumbles for her shoes.

  “You don’t have to leave,” says Natalie, but something stiff and awkward has crept in around her words, and Olive senses that she does have to go, and fast, before this all gets worse.

  “Mmm, yeah, gotta run.” She shoves her feet into her shoes, marring the fresh paint on her toenails, and leans over to find the car keys that have slid off the mattress to the floor. She finds them under the dust ruffle, stippled with the tears that slip out of her eyes once she’s safely out of Natalie’s line of sight.

  Wiping her face, she stands and turns. “How did you know? That I was a lesbian. Because I didn’t even know. Not really.” Maybe she did know, though, because she can feel the logic of it all clicking into place, like a critical piece of a puzzle she’s been staring at for the better part of the last year. Did my mom see it? she wonders suddenly. Maybe that’s what her mom meant when she lectured Olive about finding her own thing and being whoever she wants to be; maybe that was why she got so frustrated with Olive all the time. Maybe Billie could see in Olive the things that Olive was incapable of seeing in herself. For a moment, before she can think straight, she imagines going home and asking her mother about it, maybe even crying in her lap a little, and then she remembers that her mother isn’t there anymore and apparently never will be again.

  Natalie shrugs. “Well, you don’t really care about boys. And that’s kind of a giveaway.”

  “Right.” Olive backs toward the door. She stops, thinking of something else: “You won’t say anything, will you?”

  Natalie frowns. “It’s not like it’s something to be ashamed of. In fact, it’s kind of cool, you know? Lesbianism is very on-trend. Even more so if you decide to, like, cross-dress or transition—”

  Olive cuts her off, feeling queasy. “Please?”

  Her friend looks abashed. “OK, sure.”

  As she’s halfway out the door, she hears Natalie’s murmur: “I’ll see you at school Monday.” Olive thinks she hears something hopeful in Natalie’s voice, something that makes her wonder if she should turn around and go back to her; as though Natalie is as worried about everything that was just forever-fucked as Olive is.

  But it’s too late.

  “Probably not,” she says.

  —

  She drives back down the hill toward her house. Under the shivering canopy of oak trees that line Tunnel Road; past the Claremont Hotel, which looms over the road like a colossal wedding cake; through the parking snarl by the monstrous new Safeway. She cruises down into her own neighborhood, slightly shabbier, more bohemian, but when it comes time to turn right onto her own street, she keeps going.

  It feels good to be in her mother’s car, cocooned, the heat blasting, the worn-in foam of the seat molding to her rump. The overcast sky speckles a thin sheen of moisture on the windshield. Halloween pumpkins rot into goo on the porches of the houses she passes; plastic ghouls drag themselves out of landscaped lawns; skeletons jangle from tree limbs. She usually loves Halloween, but this year, the shivery promise of the dead coming back to life just makes her feel depressed.

  She turns the dial of the radio until she gets to the Berkeley college station, which is playing some kind of retro funk, and lets the music guide her west toward the bay. Then south; and west again, over the San Mateo Bridge. The sun sets; traffic thickens and slows like clotting blood. She tells herself that she’s not going anywhere in particular, just driving, but when the Subaru finally sputters to a stop, she looks up and isn’t at all surprised to see that she’s in front of Sharon Parkins’s house.

  It’s dark out now, but every window in Sharon’s house is illuminated. The cypress trees sway in the evening breeze, describing lazy circles in the sky. As Olive walks up the driveway, she can hear the faint sounds of opera, something Italian and dramatic. Her teeth chatter: She’s still in her pajamas, not even a coat.

  She knocks and waits.

  The person who opens the door is a man, older, about her dad’s age. He’s got bulgy eyes and a square chin and is wearing a button-down shirt and slacks with fuzzy plaid slippers. He stares at Olive,
perplexed. “Can I help you?” he asks.

  Just then Sharon appears behind him, holding a brimming glass of red wine in her hand, her breasts nearly toppling out of a low-cut fuzzy yellow sweater. She slips around her husband and grips Olive’s elbow, tugging her into the house. “It’s OK, honey. I know her,” she says as she steers Olive toward the living room and away from him.

  “Make it fast,” she says in a low voice. “My husband doesn’t like me doing this. He says it creeps him out. Plus, the legal liability, you know?” She holds the wine aloft so that it won’t spill. “So what’s up? Did you see something?”

  Olive drops down on the couch in the same place she sat last time. Nothing in the room has changed since she was here last: the skewered carousel horse still cantering in space, the skinned bear still staring, stoic, into the distance. “No,” she says. “That’s the problem. I’m not seeing her anymore.” And she bursts into tears.

  Sharon freezes. She sits down next to Olive on the couch, setting the wineglass on an agate coaster on the table. “Oh, honey. I warned you,” she says softly. “There’s nothing logical about this. It’s not predictable.”

  Olive wipes her nose with the back of her sleeve. “My doctor said I was having seizures. They put me on Depakote.”

  Sharon’s face goes flat. “Oh. Hell.” She picks up her wine and drinks half of it down.

  “And the visions stopped. So that means they’re right, doesn’t it? My mom was always just a hallucination? There was no significance to any of it, the visions or the butterfly beach or the woman at the nursing home, it was just my mind making connections because I wanted them to exist.”

  Sharon sets down her wine and tentatively reaches out to rub Olive’s back, her hand moving in small, stiff circles. It’s clear to Olive that Sharon hasn’t spent much time around kids or she’d know that this is the correct time for a maternal hug. “I’m not a doctor. But think about it.” She gives Olive’s back a last pat and quickly withdraws her hand. “Of course you’re going to stop seeing your mom when you start taking medication. Depakote—that stuff’s no joke. It’s messing with the chemistry of your brain. You’re blunting everything going on in there.” She glances at the door and drops her voice. “Look. I drink too much for a reason: same effect. It turns it all off when I don’t want it there. And Depakote is way stronger than a glass of wine.”