Watch Me Disappear

by Janelle Brown

  He cuts her off. “Did Billie know that Sidney was an ecoterrorist?” he asks. “I just found out the guy was setting off bombs! He was convicted of attempted manslaughter!”

  There’s a long silence on the other end of the phone. “How did you find that out?”

  “Newspaper reports. I was doing research for the memoir,” he says. “So did she know?”

  Harmony’s voice goes cool in a way that he’s never heard before. “Why do you think she left him?”

  The streetcar squeals to a stop in front of him, and he jams on the brakes. “Did she leave him before or after he got arrested?”

  It takes a long time for Harmony to respond. “Jonathan,” she says carefully. “Billie turned him in.”

  He feels disoriented, the world flipping upside down again. Could Sidney have gotten out of jail and come looking for vengeance? The missing money—maybe it was some sort of emergency fund that Billie started, thinking she might have to flee from Sidney in order to save her own life. Was she in hiding from him? Or worse: Jonathan closes his eyes and sees his wife hiking up in Desolation Wilderness, Sidney tight on her heels, waiting for the right moment to strike.

  A kid getting off the J Church stares through the windshield at Jonathan, probably wondering why the guy driving the Prius looks like he was just punched in the face. “Why didn’t she tell me?”

  There’s another void-like silence, as if a thumb has been pressed over the receiver. When Harmony speaks again, her words are sharp and precise. “Billie wanted to put all that behind her. She wanted to forget it ever happened.”

  The streetcar lurches forward again and Jonathan creeps along behind it, growing impatient with its glacial speed, with Harmony, with everyone. “And you? You could have told me the other day, when I asked you about him.”

  “She made me promise not to say anything. I was just being true to her request.” She is pleading now. “Don’t be upset. Honestly, Jonathan, it was all so long ago. Decades!” Her voice gets small. “Are you mad at me?”

  He is mad at her, irrationally angry. Don’t you see? All this time I might have been going down the wrong path, furious at Billie when I should have been worried about her. But then he reminds himself, That’s not fair. Harmony doesn’t know what he’s been going through. It’s his own fault for not filling her in.

  “No. I’m not mad at you. Don’t worry about it.” He sees his destination looming ahead. “Sorry, I gotta go. I’ll call later.”

  —

  Sidney Kaufman lives in a peeling gray apartment building in the outskirts of the Excelsior District. Jonathan parks in front of a boarded-up corner store and walks up the street to Sidney’s building, past a salon called Gla-more Nails and a café painted in graffiti portraits of hip-hop stars with oddly macrocephalic heads. The area is socked in by dense fog, and by the time Jonathan gets to the front door, his wool coat is dripping with condensation.

  He locates Sidney Kaufman’s name written in slanted handwriting on a piece of peeling tape next to buzzer number six. He steps back and peers up at the windows of the building, all of which have their backs turned against the outside world. One set of windows is covered over with cardboard, another with broken venetian blinds; then there are paisley curtains; sun-faded Ron Paul campaign signs from several elections back; a sagging sheet; peeling tinfoil. Jonathan considers the windows, wondering which one belongs to Kaufman. Does he have something up there that needs to be hidden?

  (My wife?)

  Jonathan presses the buzzer. The bell sputters, an electric crackle. No one answers. He cups his hands against the scratched glass of the vestibule and looks in, but the only thing to see is a water-damaged telephone book, dismantled in pieces on the floor, and a pile of take-out menus for a Chinese restaurant.

  A powerful smell of curry wafts on the fog from someone’s apartment, and Jonathan realizes he hasn’t eaten anything since the breakfast that Harmony cooked for him this morning. He heads back down the street to the café, which turns out to be fairly cheery, a neighborhood kind of place with cling-wrapped pastries the size of his head. Scone and coffee in hand, he walks back and settles in a doorway across the street from Sidney’s apartment, waiting for him to show up.

  An hour passes, and no one comes in or out of the building. It’s not even five o’clock, but somewhere beyond the fog, the sun is already setting. A persistent wind picks up, blowing down the hill, piercing through the lapels of his coat. The trickle of pedestrians picks up, mostly Chinese and Latino commuters making the trek back home from the Balboa Park BART station.

  As he sits there, he finds himself thinking, oddly, of Jenny. For a long time after his sister died, he clung to the idea that she might be a ghost: still by his side, keeping him company, even if he couldn’t see her. Later, he grew to think of her as a kind of invisible cheerleader, urging him on when he got drunk for the first time, asked out a girl he liked, learned to snowboard. Her voice in his head, cutting through the self-doubt: Don’t be so afraid. But that stopped once he was in his late twenties, with Billie in his bed and Olive the next room over. Instead of being a tangible presence, Jenny faded into something more abstract, a pang that would strike him at unexpected moments and make his eyes tear up at the half-forgotten sensation of loss.

  What would it be like to have Jenny here now, as his sounding board? Would she have been a voice of reason, able to put this mess into perspective? Would she have instinctively understood Billie in a way that he apparently can’t? He closes his eyes and tries to envision her as an adult, but all he can see is a ten-year-old girl frozen in time, a tanned tomboy worried about nothing more than sprained ankles and missing homework. She has no advice to offer him today. Who knows whom she might have turned into; who knows whether they even would have been close.

  He is alone in this.

  He startles when the door of the building across the street slams with a loud bang. He looks up and sees a young woman in a rainbow-colored sweater-coat exit from the building across the street. She heads toward a hatchback Volkswagen and fumbles for her keys.

  He darts across the street, intercepting the woman in front of her car. She’s holding a pet carrier under her arm, and a very angry cat mewls from inside it. “Hi, can I ask you a quick question?” he asks.

  She whips around, taking in his damp hair and limp clothes, and takes a step back, holding the pet carrier between them as a shield. He holds up his hands. “I’m not a stalker or a weirdo, I swear. I’m just trying to find someone that I think lives in your building.”

  She hesitates, long enough for him to dig the photograph out of his pocket. When he holds it up, she glances at it quickly, and her face relaxes. “Oh, him. Yeah, he lives a floor below me.”

  “What’s he like?” he says. “Scary? Dangerous?”

  “What? Um, no?” She frowns, still backed up against the Volkswagen. “I mean, I don’t know him well. But he says hi in the stairway. Not everyone does that.”

  “He nearly killed a police officer,” Jonathan says sharply. “He set off a bunch of bombs and spent twenty-four years in jail.”

  “Really?” The girl looks horrified. “Him? Are you sure?”

  Jonathan nods. “You wouldn’t happen to know if he has a woman hidden up there, would you? You ever hear strange sounds, like, you know, someone’s being held against their will?”

  The girl’s eyebrows rocket north. “Ohmygod, no!” She frowns. “Do you think I need to move? Is he a predator or something?”

  “I’m sure you’re fine,” Jonathan reassures her.

  She doesn’t look convinced. “Sorry, but I have to go. I’ve got a vet appointment, and I’m going to be late,” she says, swinging open the driver’s door. Before she climbs in, though, she takes one glance back down at the photograph in his hand. She hesitates. “I’ve seen her, too,” she says.

  His heart flips. “Her?” He stupidly points to Billie, as if there might be another woman in the photo.

  “Yeah,” she says. �
��She looks a lot different now. Older. More conservative. But yeah, I’m pretty sure I saw her. A few times.”

  He looks back up at the apartment building, with its rows of blinded windows. “Recently?”

  The girl shakes her head. “It was a while back, definitely not in at least a year. I remember because the last time they were yelling at each other so loud you could hear them in my apartment.”

  He looks at the picture. “And then what happened?”

  The girl shrugs. “She left. I watched her drive off.” She slides into the driver’s seat and turns the key in the ignition. The cat in the backseat lets out a furious yowl. “Gotta go. My cat ate an M&M.”

  He watches her pull out of her parking space, lurching inch by inch until she’s free, and then creep slowly off down the street. It’s starting to get dark. The streetlights flip on, click click click, casting the street in a sickly sulfurous glow. His phone beeps with a text message from Olive: At Natalie’s, home soon.

  He digs in his coat pockets until he finds the crumpled receipt from the café and a stub of pencil. He thinks for a minute, questions spinning in his mind. But the paper is too tiny for nuance, so he writes six words—I need to talk to you—and adds his name and phone number. Then he slips it into Sidney’s mailbox.

  He examines the apartment building windows one last time. The tinfoil, he decides. Maybe the cardboard. And then he jogs back toward his car to try to beat the rush-hour traffic home.

  OLIVE IS PRETTY SURE that her dad is hungover when he takes her out to brunch on Sunday morning. His breath still has alcohol on it, there’s a suspicious smell of cigarette smoke threading his hair, and his eyes are bloodshot. This worries her: The last time she saw him like this was in those awful months after her mom first disappeared, when she would sometimes hear him stumbling around the house in the middle of the night like a confused poltergeist.

  He sits across from her at some fancy new restaurant a few blocks from their house, the kind of place where the egg dishes have French names and the salt on the table is pink. It’s the exact opposite of the café they used to go to all the time with her mom—a local institution dating back to the People’s Park days that sold fruit Danish and tofu scrambles and had a bunch of old guys playing bluegrass on weekends.

  Her father nurses a black coffee, the hollows under his eyes slowly disappearing.

  She picks at her breakfast. “My eggs are runny,” she observes.

  He peers over at her plate. “No, they’re just cooked the French way.”

  “I don’t know why we didn’t just go to Emmy’s,” she says, stirring them into goo on her plate.

  “I needed a change from Emmy’s,” he says as he lifts a spoon of bruléed oatmeal to his mouth. “We’ve been there too many times.”

  She drags a triangle of toast through the mess on her plate and sucks the egg off. There’s some kind of early Halloween festival taking place on the street, little kids in costumes thronging the stores, collecting candy in plastic jack-o’-lantern buckets. Queen Elsa and Spider-Man toddle past the window, their mouths stuffed with lollipops. Elsa stops and peers in the window at Olive, then sticks out her tongue.

  Startled, Olive makes a face back at the girl. The little girl rolls her tongue from left to right. After a moment, Olive realizes that the girl can’t even see her. She’s just examining her purple tongue in the reflection.

  “I wonder if their parents know that food coloring is toxic,” she says out loud. She looks back at her father and realizes that he’s staring intently at her, as if he’s trying to see right through her skin and skull and into her brain. “Dad, stop it,” she says finally.

  “What?”

  “You’re staring at me,” she says.

  He blinks. “Just wondering if you’re feeling any better today.”

  “Lots,” she says truthfully.

  He looks relieved. “Maybe you just needed to stabilize. Have you had any more seizures?”

  “No,” she says, thinking of the pill bottle in her room at home. Of how she tipped the Depakote pills into the toilet when she got home from Sharon Parkins’s house; of the pretty way they swirled on their way down. She picked through the old medicine bottles in the cabinet until she found something that looked vaguely like the Depakote—a blister pack of expired allergy pills—and refilled the bottle with those. Just in case anyone bothers to watch her. Like Ms. Gillespie. Or her dad.

  She’s feeling more clearheaded already; that hopeless dulled-pencil feeling of the past few days was gone when she woke up this morning. She can feel herself vibrating around the edges again, as if her molecules are in motion, ready to tune in to whatever the world is sending her way today. Her mother is just out of sight; Olive can sense her again, creeping back in closer, almost in view. This makes everything else that’s too unbearable to think about—her father kissing Harmony, the whole fiasco with Natalie, the fact that her mother may have been kidnapped by her criminal ex-boyfriend—somehow more tolerable.

  Her father taps at the sugar crust of his oatmeal, peering underneath as if there’s something meaningful to be gleaned from the curds. “Well, I guess that means the drug is working.”

  “I guess so,” she lies.

  He presses his lips together. “I worry about you, sweetheart. You’re all I’ve got.”

  She looks at his fingers gripping the spoon and notices for the first time how wrinkly his skin is compared to her own. Not old-man hands, not yet, but closer than she remembered them being. It freaks her out. “Don’t worry about me, Dad. I’m going to be just fine.” She smiles, buoyed by her secret. “Like Mom used to say, right?”

  He makes a strange face. “Speaking of.” He clears his throat. “The court date, the hearing, is this Wednesday. I know you were planning on coming, but I don’t think that’s such a good idea after all. Everything considered.”

  It takes her a minute to figure out what he’s talking about. “You mean the hearing about Mom’s death certificate? That’s still happening?”

  “Of course it is,” he says.

  “But we think she might not be dead,” she says in disbelief. Her father says nothing, just keeps toying with his oatmeal. “What are you going to say?” she asks.

  He shakes his head. “I’m not sure yet.”

  “Call it off!” The thought of the court issuing her mother’s death certificate horrifies her, as if the act of signing a form will somehow undo any possibility of her mom being alive.

  Her father sighs. “It doesn’t work that way. They don’t let you do that. Besides, we’ve waited all year for this hearing.”

  Olive drops her fork. It bounces off the plate and clatters to the floor, sending bits of egg splattering across the table. Her father blinks at her. “You don’t even care, do you?” she says. “You’re glad she’s gone. So now you can be with Harmony.”

  She stands up and walks out the door of the restaurant, leaving her father scrambling to flag down the waiter for the check.

  She is almost back to their house when she hears his feet slapping the pavement behind her. He comes up alongside, breathing hard, his hands pressed to his waist. “Hey,” he says. “I get that you’re mad at me. But you’re not being fair. This isn’t about Harmony. And it’s not about looking for your mom, either. This is about a legal process that I have little say over.” He stares at his feet and then bursts out: “For chrissake, Olive, it’s about paying the bills. We need the life insurance money.”

  Her hands reflexively go up to cover her ears. She doesn’t like to think about things like this, the invisible mechanisms keeping everything moving. The way you don’t ever want to eat sausage again once you know what’s in it. “You have to be honest,” she says. “You get to say what you know.”

  “What I know? Olive, I know your mother had an ex-boyfriend who got out of jail. I know she did some unexplained things before she died. I know she wasn’t particularly truthful with me. And I know you’ve had what you think are visions but that a d
octor believes are epileptic seizures. So what does that all add up to? I honestly have no clue.” He stops in his tracks. “Christ,” he mutters, staring at something up ahead.

  She follows his gaze and sees a strange man sitting on their porch. Maybe a junkie who needed a place to sit? He’s gaunt, with long hair pulled back into a stringy ponytail, a receding hairline exposing several inches of pale scalp. A neck tattoo—it looks like a bird—peeks out from the hood of his khaki army jacket, which he wears over a faded T-shirt with a Greenpeace logo on it. He’s sitting on their steps, drinking something out of a paper take-out cup, fingering the dying camellia bushes next to the steps with a blank expression.

  The man stands when he sees them coming up the walk. Her father reaches out and grabs Olive’s hand. She tries to shake him off, but he’s insistent, gripping her so hard that she can practically feel the bones crunching against each other.

  “Ow,” she says. “What’s the problem?”

  “That’s Sidney,” he says under his breath.

  “Sidney?” She turns to goggle at the man. “You found him?”

  Her father nods uneasily. Her heart is fluttering in a way that makes her feel dizzy. She realizes that Sidney is looking right at her, squinting slightly. Does he look evil? She can’t tell. He lifts a hand in acknowledgment of her stare, and before she can stop herself, she reflexively waves back.

  Her father glances behind him, at the garden full of rainbow flags across the street, and gives Olive’s hand a tug, as if he’s considering stashing her there for safety. But Sidney is already walking toward them. He’s smiling now, a lopsided grin that transforms his face from something broken into something almost charming. His eyes are almost hypnotically black.

  “Jonathan? I think we met briefly at the memorial service.” Sidney is sticking out his hand for a shake, and her father hesitates, drops Olive’s hand, and takes it. “And this is…Olive?”

  “That’s right,” she says, disarmed.