Watch Me Disappear

by Janelle Brown

  Olive’s phone is ringing insistently in the pocket of her hoodie. She pulls it out and glances at it—it’s her father, probably wondering where she is. She hits Decline and looks up at Sharon. “Then how do I know if the doctor is right or not? How do I know if what I saw was real?”

  Sharon shrugs. “Does it matter? It was real to you. Maybe that’s the only thing that counts.” She leans in closer. “No one else can tell you what’s happening inside your head. You’re the only one who could possibly know. They can’t. I can’t.” She looks over again at the doorway, where the shadow of her husband is hovering, as if he’s trying to stay out of sight in the hallway.

  Olive leans in conspiratorially. “But you saw something, right? That day in my mom’s car?”

  Sharon picks up her wine and stares into the bottom of her glass, swirling it so hard that it looks like the remaining wine might splash over the edge. “You love your mom, right? You really miss her? That’s what this is all about?”

  Olive nods, not liking where this is going.

  Sharon gives a little shake of her head. She stands up, finishing off her drink with one smooth tilt of her neck. “Let’s leave it that way, then. Look, I’ve got dinner on the stove. And your dad is trying to get in touch with you, isn’t he? He’s probably wondering where you are. Go home. I can’t solve anything for you.”

  Olive refuses to budge from the couch. “That’s it? That’s all you’ve got for me? ‘Go home’?”

  Sharon wipes up a spilled drop of wine from the coffee table with the edge of her hand. She licks the wine off her skin with a shockingly pink tongue. “What do you want me to say?”

  “Tell me what you would do.”

  “You tell me what you think I’d do.”

  Olive thinks. “You’d toss the drugs.”

  Sharon shrugs. “I’m not going to say that. I just think—” She hesitates and then leans down and whispers in Olive’s ear, so quietly that Olive isn’t sure if she’s heard correctly. “I wouldn’t let anyone stop me from seeing something I really want to see.”

  She starts walking to the doorway, where the shadow of her husband has vanished; but halfway there, she stops. She turns around to face Olive. “And don’t worry about your friend, she’ll get over it soon enough,” she says. She offers a faint apologetic smile. “Someday soon you’re going to find someone who loves you back.”

  Four hundred people attended Billie’s memorial. At the time I thought this was evidence that my wife had been universally beloved, but looking back, weren’t they mostly gawkers who wanted to claim their little piece of the most exciting thing that had happened to a Claremont Mom since that time Sofia Drumm got arrested for tax fraud? How many of them really know the first thing about my wife?

  It should have been obvious to me on our wedding day that Billie didn’t let anyone get close to her for long. That day in Big Sur, our guests predominantly filled my side of the aisle—my parents, my work colleagues, my college pals—whereas hers was populated with a smattering of art school friends, friends who would vanish entirely in the years to come.

  Back then I figured that Billie was a bit of a lone wolf, struggling to ground herself after all those itinerant years, and working too hard to establish much of a social network of her own. Another reason she needed my love and support. Another reason we needed to have a kid and build our own cozy little unit of three.

  But the years passed and the pattern continued. She was always surrounded by people, and her social calendar was packed; but close friends tended to come and go as Billie grew impatient with their shortcomings and moved on. I can still see the faces that passed through our house, and I remember their flaws as Billie articulated them to me: Jane, the anti-vaxx hardliner with no understanding of science; Emma, the depressive who talked incessantly about leaving her creepy exhibitionist husband but never did anything about it; Trudi, who launched a GoFundMe to raise fourteen thousand dollars for cancer treatments for her eighteen-year-old blind Chihuahua but refused to buy Girl Scout cookies when Olive came around because sugar. These women would sit at our dining room table, stuffing envelopes with Claremont spring fundraiser invitations, gossiping with Billie as they worked their way through a bottle of pinot; and then one day, out of the blue, they’d be gone.

  “I just couldn’t anymore,” Billie would say when I asked about someone, and she’d make a face. “I have no patience at all for her special brand of bullshit.”

  The thing was—I secretly liked this about her. I liked the way it made me feel so chosen. Other people might come and go, but I was the one she really loved. She held the bar so very, very high, and Olive and I were the only ones who made the cut. It made me feel closer to her.

  But now that she’s gone, I have to wonder: Was that bar so impossibly high that no one, not even Olive or I, could hang on to it for long? Did our particular brand of bullshit finally cross the threshold of her limits? Should I have realized, that day in Big Sur when I smiled blindly out at a crowd comprised almost entirely of my friends, that I was marrying a woman who didn’t want to be known by anyone—not even me?

  If I dig back far enough in Billie’s history, will I finally find someone who knows what was really going on inside her?

  THE DECODE MEDIA OFFICE is on the eighth floor of a generic building in a neighborhood of San Francisco that a few years earlier was known for its transients and nightclubs but now features a dozen blindingly new office buildings and luxury condo towers, with more on the way. In order to get to the Decode entrance, Jonathan has to pass through a scaffolding walkway, kicking aside neon-pink flyers advertising escorts and tarot readings. The air smells like urine and roasting coffee.

  He hasn’t been here since the day, eight months earlier, when he quit his job. Looking around, he experiences an unexpected pang of nostalgia. The daily trudge from the BART station, the cheese roll from the café in the foyer, the early-morning hum of a hundred computers in an empty office: the soothing normalcy of it all. What exactly was it about this place that he grew to loathe, anyway? Why did he throw it all away? From his vantage point now, Decode is as inviting as a beanbag chair, as if he could sink back in and stay there forever because it’s too damn hard to get back up.

  At the front desk, the receptionist, a blue-haired kid Jonathan doesn’t recognize, asks him to sit down while he summons Desi, Jonathan’s former investigative assistant. Jonathan settles stiffly into a couch as magazine staffers pass by, waiting for someone to recognize him. They look harried, focused on the vital urgency of whatever tidbit of news the world is obsessed with today.

  They’ll cry when you leave and buy you a Costco cake with your name on it and then forget about you ten minutes later when they replace you with someone younger and fresher and cheaper.

  He sips at his complimentary bottle of water, pecks around on his cellphone, idly checking the ipTracer app without much hope. He’s uploaded the entire memoir to the website at this point, hundreds of pages of increasingly vitriolic ramblings about his wife; what more of a lure can he give her?

  Your page has been visited by 1 unique IP address.

  He has to read this twice before he’s sure he’s not hallucinating. He stares at the IP address, just a string of meaningless numbers, and then realizes he can click on the number for further information. He clicks.

  The app churns for a half second, then spits back an answer:

  Continent: North America

  Country: United States

  City: New York

  ISP: Random House

  It’s his publisher.

  Oh, crap, he thinks. On cue, the phone in his hand starts to ring, his agent’s name appearing on the screen. JEFF FREELS.

  Reluctantly, he answers. “Hi, Jeff,” he says, forcing sunshine into his voice.

  “Jonathan, what the hell?” The spit in his agent’s voice sizzles on the line. “Your editor just called me, he says he just stumbled across the manuscript of your book online? He says you’re self-pub
lishing it as a…as a blog? Is that right?”

  Jonathan stares at a stain on the rug that’s the exact shape of Brazil. “It wasn’t self-published, exactly. I didn’t expect anyone to see it.”

  “Yeah, well, your editor came across it easy enough with a Google search on your wife’s name. Don’t you understand that you do not own that book anymore? You cashed a check, they own it. You don’t have the right to self-publish. They can sue you for that.”

  “I’ll take it down,” Jonathan says.

  “Good, but that’s only half the problem.” His agent sounds on the verge of apoplexy. “Apparently it’s not even the book you told him you were writing. He says it makes Billie sound like some kind of raging bitch. Like you’re hashing out all your marital issues with her on the page. Like maybe you’re not so sad that she’s gone after all. Is that true?”

  Jonathan considers this. “It’s all a little complicated right now.”

  Jeff’s voice hits high volume; Jonathan has to hold the phone away from his ear. “Jesus, Jonathan. This is supposed to be a grief memoir. What happened? This was your great lost love?”

  The blue-haired receptionist is staring at him. Jonathan lowers his voice. “Things…changed.”

  “Well, Elliot says that if this is the book you plan to turn in, he doesn’t want it. So you better rethink your direction fast. You’ve only got, what, three months to finish this thing?”

  “I don’t know if I can write that book anymore,” Jonathan says quietly.

  There’s a long, slow intake of breath on the other end of the line. “OK, I get that maybe you’re feeling something you weren’t expecting to feel when you started writing this thing. That happens. But can’t you put that aside for the purposes of the book? It’s called artistic license.”

  Jonathan’s stomach turns as he considers the question he’s been avoiding for the last few weeks. Can he fake it? For the sake of his book deal? For the sake of his very livelihood? He thinks of a line he read in The New York Times Book Review not long ago—a review written by Gregory Cowles, of a Mary Karr book—that landed painfully close to home: All memoirs are lies, even those that tell the truth. They can’t help it, because the longer we live the more our fixed pasts keep changing. And yet he doesn’t even have a narrative to seize on anymore; he can’t get a grip on his own protagonist. Was she a fundamentally good person? A monster? Something in between? Both at the same time? How can he possibly finish a book about her when he doesn’t know who she really was? Or still is?

  “I don’t know,” he says at last.

  There’s a long silence. When Jeff speaks again, he sounds completely deflated. “You realize what this means? You’ll lose your contract. You’ll have to pay back your advance. Do you even have that kind of money lying around?”

  Jonathan swallows back the bile that rises at the thought of this sum.

  “Jonathan?” Desi stands in front of him. From where he sits on the couch, he’s eye level with her big black boots and a sweater that sweeps down to her knees.

  “Jeff, look, I’ve got to run. Just…tell them I’m sorry. I’ll figure something out.” He hangs up and then pushes himself upright so that he’s towering over her; when she hugs him, he feels something pushing against him. “Desi…You’re…?”

  “Pregnant,” she says. “You’d think I was a leper, the way the kids here treat me. No one wants to sit next to me at the story meetings. I think they believe they might catch it if they accidentally touch me.”

  He follows her through the maze of cubicles, which has shifted since he was here last: new routes leading to entirely new destinations and a sea of faces he doesn’t recognize. A few people pop up to call his name from across the room, wave a quick greeting, but everyone’s too lost in deadline to chat. “A lot of new hires?” he asks hopefully. If Decode is doing well, maybe they’ll be able to hire me back. Six months back on salary and I’ll have enough to reimburse my publishers.

  She rolls her eyes. “Last spring it was all about longform, right? Then upper management starting freaking out that investigative journalism cost too much money. As of this fall we’re going for utility: all explainers and charts. The new guy who replaced you brought in a bunch of kids from L.A. to make video content, but honestly, it’s a sinking ship. I think layoffs are looming.” She sighs.

  “Decode always pulls through,” he says, trying to remain positive. “Decode is the cockroach of the digital media age, you just can’t kill it.”

  She laughs. “You had the right idea, go do your own thing, write a book. All that glorious time. Going to bed before midnight. No middle-of-the-night emails or six A.M. deadlines. It sounds like heaven.”

  “You have no idea,” he says.

  In her cubicle, Desi clears magazines off a stained IKEA armchair and motions him to sit. A strange whirring noise: He looks up and sees that someone is flying a toy drone over the heads of the writers. It hovers a few cubicles away; he hears someone swear, and a hand pops up in the air and gives the drone the finger. The drone swerves out of reach, wobbles a bit, and then zooms off toward the conference room.

  “So, show me what you need.” Desi settles in before her screens.

  He slides the Polaroid toward her: Sidney and Billie peering out at him from 1992. Maverick and Sparrow. Desi picks up the photograph by its edges and peers at it closely. After a minute, she does a double take. “Is that Billie?”

  “I’m interested in the guy she’s with,” he says. “I need to figure out who he is. All I know is his first name—Sidney—and that he was in jail in Oregon for drug dealing. Early nineties. Can you help me dig up his full name?”

  “Shit, pre-Internet, huh? Well, there are options,” she says. She puts the photograph in her scanner and loads it up on her screen. She crops his face out of the picture and opens a new Photoshop window, zooming in for a close-up portrait. “I can try an image search in a few databases, run it past NICAR. Let me see what that turns up.”

  He sits in the chair behind her and waits, flipping through a three-month-old copy of The Atlantic. The newsroom buzzes and clicks and murmurs around him, a familiar white noise. Eventually Desi whispers something under her breath and then turns around. “Found him. Check this out.”

  She tilts the screen of her computer so he can see. It’s a mugshot of a man—a boy, really—in front of a blue background, staring crookedly at the camera with a stunned, glassy expression. His hair is longer than it is in the other photo, his beard bushier, and his face more gaunt, but there’s no question: It’s Sidney.

  “Sidney Kaufman,” Desi reads. “Arrested in Bend, Oregon.”

  “Convicted of drug dealing?”

  She types again and frowns. “Yes, and a whole lot of other things.”

  He peers over her shoulder. “Like what?”

  “Arson, attempted manslaughter.”

  “Manslaughter?” He watches as Desi plugs some keywords into a database and pulls up an old news brief from The Oregonian.

  Sidney Kaufman was convicted today of four charges, including attempted manslaughter, conspiracy to use fire or explosives to damage corporate and government property, and possessing a controlled substance with intent to sell. Kaufman and his co-conspirator, Vincent Sparto, were arrested earlier this year for setting a series of firebombs that destroyed several properties, including a wild mustang shelter and a U.S. Department of Agriculture dam. Caught in the act of sabotaging a ski resort, Kaufman critically wounded an officer of the law. Estimates put the amount of damage at $18 million. Sparto pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity and was committed to psychiatric care. Kaufman faces 25 years in prison.

  “He was an ecoterrorist,” Jonathan says out loud. His mind spinning, adding up the details. The years out in the woods. His wife’s talk about being “scared straight” when she left the Pacific Northwest; her alarming reaction when she got the letter. His stomach drops. Jesus, was this why she fled the Pacific Northwest all those years ago? She found out her boyfrien
d was some kind of sociopath?

  “Sounds like it.” Desi sits back and distractedly runs a hand across the taut weave of her sweater.

  “Can you find out when he was released?”

  She turns back to her computer and types again. “About two years ago.” Just when Billie’s string of deception began, he realizes. Christ, maybe Olive was right: Maybe Billie was in danger. A murderous sociopath, who reportedly had an obsessive relationship with his wife, gets out of jail; and within the year, she disappears? It can’t be a coincidence. He feels like he might throw up.

  Desi looks over her shoulder at him. “Is this for the memoir or something? He was an old friend of Billie’s?”

  “He was her boyfriend.”

  “Oh, wow.” She spins her chair to face him, sliding down in her seat to take the pressure off her belly. “Did she know what he was doing?”

  The drone passes overhead again, stopping to hover a few feet above Jonathan’s head. He notices that there’s a GoPro camera attached to its frame, and it’s aimed at his face. He wonders who’s watching him and what that person thinks he’s seeing. Jonathan stares directly into the lens for a minute, the drone shivering in the air above him; and then abruptly, he stands up and bats it across the corridor. The drone smashes into the wall and falls, whining noisily, to the ground.

  “Only one way to find out.” He sits back down. “Can you figure out where this guy lives now?”

  —

  He calls Harmony as he winds his way across San Francisco, tailing a Muni streetcar up over Noe Valley and toward the outer Mission. (The J Church, he notices, with no small amount of irony.) Harmony answers on the third ring. “Hey, baby,” she says. “I’m not at your place anymore—”