Olive turns around and sees Harmony standing behind her. Canvas bags full of farmers’ market bounty dangle from Harmony’s wrists. Her blond hair is wound in twin braids that she’s pinned up around her head in a crown. She appears to be wearing one of Olive’s father’s button-down shirts under her puffer.
“Maverick,” Harmony says slowly, tilting her head sideways, her forehead puckering with concern. “What kinds of stories are you telling them? Don’t you think they’ve suffered enough this year?”
Sidney looks abashed. “Of course,” he says. “Just, well, don’t you think they should—” He stops as if realizing something. He swivels his head to stare at Jonathan and then back at Harmony. “Hey, are you two together now? Wow. Sparrow would not have liked that.”
Harmony sets the market bags carefully on the ground. “Honestly, Sidney, I told you this was a bad idea.” Her voice is dangerously soft.
“He wanted it.” Sidney points at Olive’s dad. “He asked me to get in touch.”
“Wait.” Her father is looking at Harmony, confusion on his face. “Have you two…kept in touch? You didn’t mention that the other day.”
Olive watches this interaction as if through a plastic shower curtain, disembodied; she is oddly glad for Harmony’s presence, as if some crisis has been narrowly averted. She teeters slightly, feeling like the ground has just tilted under her feet. And then it’s on her. The dizzy feeling that’s been lingering on Olive’s periphery all morning is pouring through her as if a dam has finally broken somewhere within. She’s vaguely aware that she’s made a strangling sound—that her father and Harmony have turned to look at her, that Sidney has broken off mid-sentence to stare at her—but their presence isn’t real anymore.
What’s real: her mother, sitting in a lawn chair a few feet away from her, pants rolled up to her knees. Smoking a cigarette. (A fleeting, dismaying thought: Mom smokes now?) A smell of the sea, sand stretching out beyond them both into the distance. There’s a tree hanging over Olive’s head that wasn’t there a few seconds before, its leaves rattling in a breeze.
Mom’s back, Olive thinks happily.
Her mom takes a long drag of the cigarette and scratches at a scab on her shin. “Don’t believe a word he says,” she says, exhaling. “He’s not to be trusted.” She makes a sweeping gesture with the lit end of the cigarette. “Your father, either.”
Did all that stuff in Oregon really happen that way? The question in Olive’s mind is so loud that it makes her head throb.
“Ancient history,” her mom says, and stubs the cigarette out in the grass. “Pay it no mind. It holds no bearing on the present.”
But the past piles up, it builds a ladder to where you are now; without it, how would you get anywhere? Without it, who would you be? Can you really start new and leave your past behind? Because I want to, Mom. I want to start over. I want to be someone totally new. Show me how.
Her mother doesn’t appear to hear this. She shakes out her hair, turns her head beatifically toward the light filtering through the tree. It dapples her skin, shadows her eyes. A whisper on the breeze, even as her mother’s mouth stays closed. “You’re closer than you know, Olive.”
Olive realizes she’s stopped breathing. Her lungs lurch open and she’s suddenly dry-heaving, on the verge of vomiting. She drops to the ground, her knees giving way beneath her.
“Shit, man,” she hears Sidney say. “What’s wrong with your daughter?”
She feels her father’s hands grasping her shoulders, smells the oatmeal on his breath. “She’s having a seizure,” her father says, his voice so close that it makes her head throb. “Olive, sweetheart, can you talk to me?”
Her mother’s outline fades sharply and then vanishes. The vast stretch of sand sifts away, resolving itself into their sodden, half-dead lawn. The world rushes back in.
“I’m fine, just a little dizzy,” she insists, taking her father’s hand and pulling herself upright. She wobbles a bit as she stands. The grass below her feet buckles strangely. Sidney is staring at her, agog.
“Should we call the doctor?” Harmony’s cool hand is on her forehead and Olive turns her head to shrug it off.
“I’m going to take her inside.” Her father grips Olive’s elbow and steers her up the path toward the house despite her weak protests that she’s OK, just give her a minute, she’ll be fine.
Sidney steps aside to let them by. He picks his empty coffee cup off the ground and cradles it in his hands. “Sorry,” he says. “I’ll leave.” He turns to survey the three of them, stopping at Olive. Studying her face as if looking for someone else inside her. “It was nice to meet you, Olive. Maybe I’ll see you again sometime.”
Olive cranes her neck to watch Sidney head down the path toward the sidewalk. His jeans sag around his hips when he walks, catching on his pelvic bones in a way that suggests the skeleton underneath. He stops at the end of the driveway to throw the empty cup in the recycling bin.
“Hey,” her father yells. Sidney freezes with the lid half open. He looks down into the contents of the recycling bin with bafflement and then back up at them. Her father lowers his voice just slightly: “You don’t know where Billie is now, do you?”
Sidney’s face puckers with confusion. “How would I know that? Heaven? Hell? Reincarnated as an elephant? Daffodil food? Is that what you’re asking?” He starts to gently lower the lid of the recycling bin, then changes his mind and lets it drop. The lid slams shut, making Olive jump a little.
“Wherever she is,” Sidney finishes, wiping his hands clean on his jeans, “I can’t imagine she’s happy about it.”
One thing I remember
She used to
Billie was
I know
I thought
I
I
I
AFTER SIDNEY LEAVES, the three of them gravitate numbly toward the house and then into the kitchen. Harmony unloads the vegetables from her market bags onto the counter while Jonathan, stunned, pours a glass of water for Olive. Olive sits at the kitchen table and immediately puts her head down, nose pressed to the wood.
Harmony’s chirpy chatter fills the silence. “Well. How about that. So strange of him to show up on your doorstep. What did he have to say for himself? God, he looked awful. Poor guy.”
Jonathan sits at the table next to Olive and puts a hand on her back, feeling her heavy breath through the fabric of her shirt. “Be honest with me, now,” he says to her. “You stopped taking the Depakote, right?”
Olive nods, her forehead tapping the table.
Harmony comes closer and stands behind him, placing a warm palm on his neck and giving it a little squeeze of sympathy. “Should she go to the doctor?” she asks in a low voice.
Olive’s head rockets back up. “No. She shouldn’t.” She stares at Harmony, her pupils slightly dilated, until Harmony’s hand slides off Jonathan’s neck. Olive abruptly stands. “I’m going to go lie down,” she says, and disappears out the door.
“Hey,” he calls after her. “We’re going to talk about all this, OK?”
“Whatever.” Jonathan hears her feet trudging up the stairs and then the click of her door latching.
Harmony picks up Olive’s water glass and places it in the sink, then looks around the kitchen uncertainly. “Should I go?”
“You didn’t mention that you’d kept in touch with Sidney.” This comes out more accusingly than he intends it to.
Her fingers fuss at the sleeve of her shirt—is he crazy, or is it one of his own?—buttoning and unbuttoning the cuff. “Oh, I wouldn’t say we keep in touch. He looked me up when he first landed in the Bay Area. I felt sorry for him. I met him for coffee and connected him with an old chef friend of mine about a job as a prep cook. That’s really the last I saw of him. Well, maybe we chatted a little at Billie’s memorial service last year.” She shrugs. “Why, are you upset about that?”
He buries his head in his hands, taking this in. “Tell me this: Were you involve
d in all that, too? Up in Oregon?”
“No.” Harmony slowly gathers her empty market bags, folding them into neat squares. “No. I mean, I knew what they were doing. I begged Billie to let me be a part of it, even followed them up to that cabin outside Bend, but Billie wouldn’t let me get involved. She told me that I was”—she screws up her face as if trying to recall the exact words, even though her expression suggests that she remembers quite clearly—“amateur-hour, and this was the big leagues, and I should go back to college and be a good girl and finish my degree and stay out of trouble.” She wrinkles her nose as if amused by this former version of herself. “At the time I was hurt—I worshipped her, you know?—but later, after everything went down, I was so thankful. I really dodged a bullet on that one.”
“So did Billie, sounds like,” he says.
“Well, yes. For different reasons.”
He’s silent for a minute, trying to piece together all the conflicting stories he’s heard at this point. “So how did you know that Billie turned them in if you weren’t around by then?”
“I read the news reports after they got arrested, and I just knew. Sidney and Vincent just happened to get pulled over for a broken taillight, and Billie just happened not to be there?” She laughs. “Please. Maybe I was naïve, but I wasn’t stupid. I’d visited them out there in that cabin in the woods, I saw how messy things were getting. It was obvious what had happened. Well, maybe not obvious to Sidney, but he was too besotted and way too high to see straight.” She looks down at the folded market bags in her hands, aligning them in a stack. “After Billie and I reconnected in Berkeley, I confronted her about it. She told me she was afraid that Sidney and Vincent were going to accidentally kill someone if they kept it up. That they needed to be stopped and she couldn’t think of another way to stop them….” Her voice trails off, as if she’s still puzzling her way through the logic of this explanation.
Jonathan sits there taking this in. He can feel Harmony studying him, waiting for his reaction, but he can’t bring himself to meet her gaze. He thinks of Billie, a suitcase full of money, fleeing Oregon; heading where?
The heater ticks on as the temperature drops, and a blast of hot air from the vent sends dust bunnies skittering across the kitchen floor. Upstairs, he can hear the creak of the floorboards as Olive moves around her room. “I should probably go talk to Olive,” Jonathan finally says.
Harmony nods quickly, glancing up at the clock. “That’s OK, there’s a yoga class I’d like to hit up anyway. I’m really feeling like I need to get centered right now.” She leans over and kisses Jonathan on the cheek. “Call me later?” She spins off, out the door before he can respond one way or the other.
Jonathan finds himself alone in the kitchen. He stands there motionless for a minute, incapable of mustering the willpower to go upstairs and face his surly daughter. He jerks open a cupboard above the refrigerator and pours himself several fingers of bourbon, which he swallows in one quick gulp. It burns going down, and then the dull heat spreads through him, loosening him until he feels like he can breathe again. He leans against the refrigerator, noticing the shabbiness of the room—the chipped paint along the floorboards, the tilting faces of the cabinetry, the grime stuck in the grout of the tile. He is struck with an unlikely desire to fix the place up.
He pours himself another drink before going to retrieve his toolbox. For the rest of the afternoon, he bumps around the kitchen, fiddling with the loose hinge on a saggy cabinet door that won’t quite close; daubing lacquer into cracks; tackling the tile with Comet and a toothbrush. Mindless, meditative manual labor. And yet his mind won’t comply, persistently buzzing with the subjects he doesn’t want to think about: lies and betrayal. His wife’s secret and highly problematic history; his not entirely forthcoming new lover; his daughter who refuses to take her meds. The money he will have to pay back to his publisher, the financial hole that he continues digging deeper.
Mostly, though, he thinks about Billie. If Sidney doesn’t have her hidden somewhere, if he’s not her lover or her abductor, then where did she go? Is she even alive? Or has he been forcing tangential evidence toward a conclusion it doesn’t deserve, spurred on by his hallucinating daughter?
He keeps coming back to the same question: Who was the woman he lived with for all those years? Billie’s identity keeps shimmering and changing in his mind, like a fish slipping through the sea; he can’t seem to fix his perspective on her anymore. Scrubbing the tile, he wonders: Do all the new things he’s learned about his wife change who she really was, or is it that he’s simply seeing her from a new angle?
A memory bubbles to the surface: a conversation they had a while back about Billie’s then-friend Emma. Emma had installed a nanny-cam and, in the process, accidentally discovered that her husband had been indecently exposing himself to both their teenage babysitter and the Guatemalan cleaning lady.
“How can you be wrong about someone for so long?” Jonathan marveled. They were sitting on the back sunporch, drinking manhattans, watching night set over the garden.
At this, Billie set her drink down on the arm of her chair and squinted at him with an expression of amused disbelief. “Easy. You can be wrong if they want you to be wrong. Look. All people are unknowable, no matter how close you may think you are. Of the millions of thoughts we all think every day, of the millions of experiences we have, how many do we allow other people to know about? A handful? And no one willingly shares their worst, do they? The flaws you see, those are like the very tip of an iceberg. So we’re all just poking around on the surface, trying to figure out the people we love with a kind of, I guess, naïve idealism.”
He looked out at the garden for a long time, listening to the crickets call to each other, digesting this. “That’s the cynical view, maybe,” he finally replied. “But I think you can know someone if they want you to know them. That’s not naïve idealism; that’s trust. That’s the foundation of love.” He turned to her with a pang of fear. “I know you, don’t I?”
Billie laughed and leaned across the arm of the chair to kiss him. “You’ve always been a glass-half-full kind of guy,” she said. “I love that about you. It’s so pure. Olive is definitely your daughter.”
Only now, picking crumbling grout from the cracks of the kitchen counter, does he realize that his wife never answered his question.
When Jonathan is done cleaning, he stands back and studies his handiwork. The kitchen doesn’t look any different than it did three hours earlier; its issues are too deep to be fixed by a quick paint job. What it really needs is to be brought down to the studs and rebuilt. What the hell, he thinks. If I don’t get that death certificate, we may be losing the house anyway.
He nudges the sagging cabinet door closed with his toe, and when it swings open again, he kicks it hard. Then he cracks a beer and goes upstairs to Olive’s room.
He raps on the doorframe with his knuckles, sticking his head around the door to see Olive sitting at her computer, her back to him. “Hey,” he says. “You ready to talk about this morning? That was a lot to take in.”
She turns quickly, closing the lid of her laptop with one hand as she does. “Can we do it later?” she asks. “I’m not really in the mood.”
“Oh.” She’s still angry about Harmony, he realizes. “Maybe you want to go to a movie?”
She looks at her computer and back at him. “I’m kind of in the middle of something.”
“Maybe tonight,” he says. “You’re home this evening? Or are you going over to Natalie’s?”
“I’m not hanging out with Natalie,” she says quickly.
There’s something in her face when she says this that makes him stop; is she fighting with her best friend? He stands there a minute longer, weighing the possibility of pressing her for details, afraid of pushing her too far and making everything worse. He’s never really understood the hothouse intimacy of female friendships, the way women consume and then repel each other. How can he help his daughter with t
hose kinds of inscrutable relationships? Is it better to just stay out of whatever’s going on and assume they’ll work it out themselves?
“All right, then. Well, we’ll talk when you’re ready.” He slips back down the hall, aware that he’s letting cowardice prevail over good parenting.
He retires to his room with his laptop and Netflix, listening to Olive tapping away on the other side of the wall. He imagines them as planets, living in the same galaxy but spinning in their separate orbits. This makes him ineffably sad. Just when it seemed like they were starting to connect, he screwed it all up, for the most selfish of reasons. Am I a bad father? he asks himself. Billie made all this look easy. Maybe I didn’t have a chance to realize what a shitty dad I am until she wasn’t around. No matter what else she might have been, she was better at this than I am.
Lying on his bed, he frets about the legal hearing on Wednesday: a quarter million on the line, and he still doesn’t know what he’s going to say. The truth, like Olive says, you have to tell the truth. But what will that accomplish? It’s not going to bring Billie back. Will it soothe some vestige of his belief in the righteousness of honesty, of doing the right thing? Or will it just mean that he loses the life insurance money that’s his best shot at pulling their lives back together?
You need a plan, the voice in his head nags. He silences it with a beer, and then another, until his confusing past and indeterminate future are both a blur, numbed by the warm immediacy of intoxication.
When he gets a text from Marcus—Meet me for a drink at Bacaloa? I’ve got your check & something to show you—he is grateful for the shock back to life.
—
Marcus is waiting for him at a tapas bar on Shattuck with big doors that open out to the street during the summertime. Tonight the doors are tightly shut against the cold. Most of the bar’s patrons seem to be soccer fans, gathered drunkenly in a huddle at the bar, watching a game on the muted big-screen television on the back wall.
Watch Me Disappear Page 27