Watch Me Disappear

by Janelle Brown

  She reaches out and takes her glass. “Either way, I’ll toast to that.” She looks sideways at him. “So what begins now?”

  What is beginning? He hadn’t thought that far. His life seems like a raft of wreckage right now, with nothing to anticipate but the slow, arduous repair of his relationship with Olive. Except that, as he looks at Harmony—wrapping himself in the comfort of her presence—another answer becomes obvious. “Us,” he says. “You and me. For real.”

  She flushes, fiddles with the hem of her sweater. “Are you saying you want me to be your girlfriend?”

  His eyes flick to the family photograph, facedown on the mantel. He is quiet, thinking of Olive. As long as she keeps believing that Billie is alive, she’s going to hang on to the false hope that her mom might come back. And that would be more painful for him to watch than the grief he’s witnessed all year. It’s time to cut it off: frame Billie’s death certificate, get past the one-year anniversary, put Olive back on Depakote, and start building a new family. It’s what’s best for Olive, he tells himself. I need to expel the specter of her mother from this house, and as long as it’s just the two of us around here, that’s never going to happen.

  He takes Harmony’s hand, turning it over and pressing a thumb against the calloused pad of her palm. “I want you to move in,” he says. Her eyes fly open wide. “I’m serious. This house is too lonely with just Olive and me rattling around in it. I’m ready for a change.”

  There’s a smile twitching at her lips. “And Olive? Is she going to accept that?”

  “Not at first. But she’ll get there eventually,” he says. “Our life isn’t over just because Billie’s dead. She’s going to have to accept that at some point, like it or not. Maybe Billie’s death certificate, plus the one-year mark, will be a turning point. She already knows you and I got together, right? We’ll give her a few months to get used to the idea, and then we can tell her that you’re moving in.”

  Maybe he’s being overly optimistic; and yet it sounds plausible. And when he looks at Harmony, he sees that she’s radiant, as if some kind of internal combustion is lighting her up from the inside out. “I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought of this. A lot,” she says. Her hand comes to rest on his leg, her fingers toying with the seam of his jeans. Her voice goes soft. “I was afraid you wanted something different. I thought maybe Billie, and the Sean situation, all that awkwardness, might be scaring you off.”

  He hesitates, feeling himself grow hard just from the proximity of her hand. “Well, yes, it’s complicated, but it’s the past. It’s behind us. Maybe that’s why this could work, because of all that shared history.” Harmony lets out a big sigh, as if she’s been holding her breath. “So is that a yes? You’ll move in?’ ’

  “Of course,” she says, dragging her fingers up until they meet his and tangle there. “I love you,” she says shyly.

  “I love you, too,” he says. The sentiment feels strange on his lips—his brain sends an instinctive red alert: the wrong woman on the receiving end—but he wills himself into it, sinking into the words until they wrap around him like a warm cloak. He pushes aside a parade of unwanted thoughts—Is this love or just convenient lust? A forced attempt to close the door on Billie once and for all?—and focuses on Harmony, who is whispering damply in his ear.

  “I’ve loved you since the moment we first met,” she continues.

  The timing on that—since we first met?—is a little discomforting; and just before he kisses her, he notices something strange about her smile—something that smacks curiously of victory—but he chalks it up to his own balky nerves. Beginnings, not endings, he tells himself as he pushes up Harmony’s implausibly soft sweater.

  And by the time he finally remembers the quote he was searching for—A story has no beginning or end—he’s in too deep to care.

  —

  Later, when Harmony is napping in a beam of sunlight on his bed, he goes downstairs to clean up the mess in the living room before Olive gets home from school.

  He puts the wineglasses in the dishwasher and finds himself thinking of his daughter’s horrified face in the courtroom, her expression of betrayal. You did the right thing, he reminds himself. She didn’t know all the factors at play, and she never should.

  He pulls out his phone to double-check whether Olive responded to his text. There’s nothing.

  He’s about to put the phone back in his pocket when he notices the ipTracer app still in prominent position on his phone’s home screen. He punches at his phone, preparing to delete it, but can’t quite make himself do it. He tries to resist the impulse; ultimately fails. He opens the ipTracer one last time, just to check.

  Your page has been visited by 3 unique IP addresses.

  There is quicksand shifting underneath his feet, ready to pull him back in. It’s probably nothing, he reassures himself, just like the last time. He carries the phone to the bottom of the stairs and stands there for a moment, listening for Harmony, but all is quiet.

  He goes back into the living room and opens the ipTracer report.

  The first IP address is the same number from last Friday, his editor at Random House.

  The second IP address is also based in New York; it presumably belongs to Jeff, his agent.

  He starts to think he’s dodged a bullet as he clicks on the third number. Surely it’s another New York address: an agency minion, a Random House marketing person, someone else sent to scope out Jonathan’s blog and help mitigate the disaster that is Where the Mountain Meets the Sky.

  But the ipTracer spits out an unrecognizable location:

  Continent: North America

  Country: United States

  City: Santa Cruz

  ISP: Surfnet

  His stomach goes sour. Santa Cruz. His intuition is sending up bright orange signal flares of distress. Maybe it’s just a fluke, he tries to reassure himself. Someone who stumbled upon the site by accident. But when he scrolls down he sees that this particular IP address has visited his site six times in four days, logging 182 page views in total.

  He glances at the clock—it’s almost three, Olive will be home from school soon, he really should wake Harmony and make sure she’s dressed before that happens. And yet he finds himself out at the curb, rummaging through the garbage can until he finds his wife’s laptop. He dusts coffee grounds off its titanium cover and takes it back inside.

  The computer hums to life in his lap. Billie’s hard drive is still an impenetrable digital hoard—a jumble of billions of irrelevant bytes—but this time around, he knows exactly what he’s searching for. Ryan Santa Cruz, he queries the computer’s search engine.

  The laptop immediately spits out an entry from Billie’s address book.

  Ryan Ratliff

  830 Madeo St.

  Santa Cruz, CA

  RR.

  Shit. He looks at this name for a long time, weighing his options. He pulls up Google and types Ryan Ratliff into the search field; but he hesitates before he clicks Return, aware of the black hole of misery into which he’s about to leap. What is this going to accomplish? Does he really want to know more about his wife’s lover? Does he really want to resurrect the woman he spent the morning burying?

  No.

  With infinite self-control, he closes the search window and quits out of the browser. Put it back in the trash can and forget about it, he tells himself. But he can hear Harmony moving around upstairs, as well as the distinct sound of Olive’s backpack being unceremoniously dumped on the front porch. And so he slams Billie’s laptop closed and slides it under the cushions of the couch, to be dealt with later.

  He dashes to meet his daughter at the door.

  Olive appears in the doorway, canted sideways from the weight of the backpack that’s hanging from the crook of her elbow. She stops when she sees her father standing in the entry, and opens her mouth to speak; and then she stops, distracted by something she’s noticed behind him.

  He turns to see Harmony standing
at the top of the stairs, wearing an old flannel shirt of his, a pair of purple lace panties, and nothing else.

  Harmony waves at Olive as if the tableau is perfectly natural. “Hi there!” she calls. “How was school?”

  Olive smiles dutifully. “Fine,” she says in a voice so small that Harmony probably has to strain to hear it. And then, under her breath, she whispers to her father: “I thought you wanted to talk.”

  “Right, God, I’m sorry,” he stumbles. “I didn’t mean her to…Poor judgment, I know. She just came over, and…”

  “Dad, she’s always over these days.” Olive is staring at the purple panties. “Next you’re going to be telling me that she’s moving in.”

  He freezes, feeling like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “Well.”

  Olive whirls to study him. Her eyes are wet, her lip quivering righteously. “Seriously?” She flings her backpack to the floor so hard that Jonathan can hear the aging hardwood splinter under the weight of a $26,720-a-year education. “You suck.”

  She marches up the stairs and brushes past Harmony, the skirt on her uniform kicking pertly with each step. His daughter gives Harmony’s purple panties a long, hard look and then disappears into her own bedroom. The door slams so hard that the house shakes, and an alarming crash echoes through the kitchen. When he peers in to check, he sees that the saggy cabinet door has finally broken straight off its hinges.

  “Whoops,” he hears Harmony murmur behind him. He makes sure to plaster a reassuring smile on his face before he turns around to face her.

  SHE CAN HEAR HER FATHER at the top of the landing, talking in a low voice with Harmony. A flurry of activity in his bedroom at the other end of the hall; a toilet flushing; the thump of Dansko clogs on the stairs. The windows of her bedroom shiver as the front door opens and then shuts, and Harmony’s Kia coughs to life in the driveway.

  Olive stands in her bedroom window, watching Harmony drive away, but she doesn’t feel particularly victorious. She won a dogfight, not the war.

  She feels like she’s back at zero when it comes to finding her mother. Worse than zero; a negative sum. What now? She has no clues left to cling to, just a string of alarming stories about her mom’s past, and not even her father or her best friend by her side. She feels like she’s been washed out to sea without a life preserver.

  After a few minutes, she hears her father rustling outside her door, his knuckles scraping along the grain of the wood. “Olive, I’m ready to talk now.”

  “I’m not,” she says.

  “C’mon, Bean. Let’s try to do this like reasonable adults.”

  “I’m pretty sure I’m the only one acting like an adult here.”

  This shuts him up. Finally, he says quietly, “I’ll be waiting downstairs when you’re ready.”

  She knows he’s lurking at the bottom of the stairs, waiting to pounce on her the second she leaves her room. She flips onto her stomach on her bed, pulls out her cellphone, and rereads her message exchange with Natalie for the hundredth time.

  Hey Nat, didn’t see u in german this morning????

  stomachache, came late

  Oh.

  …

  I’m sorry about what happened last Friday.

  It’s fine

  …

  What R U doing after school

  Plans with Ming sorry

  …

  R U avoiding me?

  No

  …

  Is everything OK w us?

  …

  …

  Nat?

  She shoves the phone back in her backpack. Overhead, Gizmo flies from one side of her cage to the other, stuttering back and forth and back again until Olive can’t take it anymore. She gets up and opens the door to the cage. “Come on out,” she tells the bird, but Gizmo refuses to leave, huddling at the far side of her cage as if the open door is some kind of trap. Olive sticks her finger in, trying to get the bird to hop on her finger, but Gizmo just flutters from bar to bar, twittering angrily, until Olive wants to cry.

  “Olive?” she hears her father calling up the stairs. “I’m making popcorn, you want some?”

  She doesn’t answer. But a few minutes later, the smell of hot buttered popcorn infiltrates her room, an olfactory diplomat. Not fair. She flips open her trigonometry textbook, refusing to engage. But her stomach growls—she missed lunch period because of her trip to the courtroom—and eventually, hunger wins.

  She climbs off her bed and tiptoes down the stairs. She can see a big bowl of popcorn sitting on the coffee table in the living room; she hears her father in the kitchen, doing something with a drill.

  She plunks down on the couch, cramming popcorn into her mouth. As she sits, her tailbone makes contact with something hard and oblong. Reaching behind her, she fishes the offending object out from underneath the pillow where it’s been tucked.

  It’s her mother’s laptop.

  Where did that come from? She puts the computer in her lap, popcorn crumbs still falling from her mouth, and runs her hand over the computer’s cover: It’s warm, thrumming, as if it’s hibernating. She imagines some essence of her mother trapped inside, waiting for her to let it out.

  It’s a sign, she thinks, brightening.

  She flips the laptop open and the screen immediately wakes up. The keyboard is filthy, spotted with spilled coffee and calcified secretions from her mother’s hands. She uses the edge of a fingernail to pick an ancient crumb from the crevasse of the B key, imagining her mom eating a sandwich while she typed. Olive pops the crumb in her mouth and lets it dissolve on her tongue.

  Her mother’s desktop materializes, an achingly familiar clutter of folders and files and sticky notes. Only one window is open: a contact from her mother’s address book. A name—Ryan Ratliff—and an address in Santa Cruz.

  Santa Cruz.

  The vectors of Olive’s life draw momentarily tight, a month of mystery closing in around one point. SYBILLA carved into a wooden rail and her mother calling to her from a windswept beach. It’s as clear as if someone drew arrows around the address and wrote PAY ATTENTION OLIVE in Sharpie above it.

  The air around her fills with butterflies, their wings moving in syncopation with her beating heart.

  This is the address where I’ll find her.

  Her father is suddenly beside her, gently tugging the laptop from her hands. “I was going to get rid of that,” he says.

  She doesn’t relinquish her grip. “Who’s Ryan Ratliff?” she asks.

  She can see a battle taking place inside him, his jaw twitching as he tests out different responses and discards them. Finally, something in his face collapses, his mouth going slack. He sits down heavily beside her. “I’ve got something unpleasant to tell you. I’ve been keeping it from you because I didn’t want you to get hurt, but it’s time that you know. Maybe if you do, you’ll understand the situation a little better.”

  “OK,” she says slowly, not liking where this is going.

  “This guy, Ryan—I think your mom might have been having an affair with him,” he says.

  She closes her eyes and sees butterflies exploding. Fragments of wings flying in all directions, the entire rainbow spectrum obliterated into dust, tiny furry bodies shorn of their plumage, falling softly to the forest floor below.

  “No,” she says. “That can’t be right. Mom wouldn’t do that.”

  He lets out a small sigh of exasperation. “It’s true, Olive. I found a letter she wrote to him.”

  “Show me,” she insists.

  He shakes his head. “That wouldn’t do you any good.”

  Understanding spreads through her, as sticky and smothering as pancake syrup. “You think that’s what happened, don’t you? You think she left us for him?”

  He stares dully at the opposite wall; the hollows around his eye sockets look bruised and blue. “Olive, please just let it go. Your mom is dead. We have a death certificate. We need to get on with our lives.”

  She does see i
t all now: why he lied to the judge this morning, why he’s been so reluctant to believe her. He thinks her mom betrayed him for someone else. But he can’t be right, it doesn’t make any sense. Wouldn’t she have seen that in her visions? Wouldn’t she have known? Is it possible he’s making this up to get her to let go and move on? Has Harmony messed with his head?

  She thinks of her mother’s warning during that last encounter, her words as she stubbed her cigarette out in the grass: He’s not to be trusted.

  “That death certificate doesn’t mean anything, and you know it,” she points out.

  He lets out a strangled sound. “Oh, Christ, Olive. Don’t make me do this. Don’t you see? Even if she’s not really dead, she wants us to believe that she is. She’s not lost in the mountains somewhere and she’s not in trouble and she doesn’t have amnesia, sweetheart. She’s gone because she wants to be gone.”

  His words are ragged, they scrape across her heart like a broken fingernail. “That’s not true. She wants me to look for her. She told me! She said she missed me!”

  “She didn’t tell you anything, Olive.” This is delivered so gently that Olive can hardly bear it. “You were having seizures. You wanted to see her, and your brain obliged. It took your memories—memories of being with your mom at the beach, seeing old photos of where she grew up, pictures of our wedding day—and reshaped them into hallucinations. That’s all.”

  “But I was right about her being alive,” she protests. “That woman at the nursing home—she saw her, remember? You said you believed her.”

  Her father shuts his eyes as if the effort required to keep them open has just surpassed his abilities. “The only thing I truly believe is that it’s just you and me now, and we need to start figuring out how to make that work. Because this”—he makes a fist and gently taps her chest with it and then taps his own, as if trying to connect them with an invisible string—“is breaking my heart.”

  This is the moment when she starts to cry, because she loves her dad, and she wants him to be happy; but she also knows that she can’t believe him, because that would be disloyal to her mother. And so she snuffles and wheezes soggily into his shoulder, strung out like a wire between two poles; and as she does, she can feel her father gently slipping the computer from her lap and out of her reach.