Watch Me Disappear

by Janelle Brown

  I’ve lost my daughter, he thinks. I tried so hard to do this right, and still, I lost her. I lost her to Billie a long time ago.

  He drifts back downstairs to the living room and stands there, looking out the front window as if Olive might magically materialize in the driveway. Garbage is scattered across the front lawn from his collision with the trash bins. Empty yogurt cups and moldy bagels and the metallic glint of Billie’s laptop computer. And then— “Jesus,” he says out loud.

  He runs back out to the curb and flings aside the trash, his hands growing gritty with coffee grounds, then jerks Billie’s computer free from the bottom of the pile.

  He sits down on the grass and turns it on, praying that he didn’t kill the damn thing when he chucked it in the bin the previous night. The hard drive whines threateningly, and there’s an ominous chunking coming from deep in the computer’s bowels, but it boots up. He waits, his jeans growing damp from something unsavory underneath his rear.

  Then he opens Billie’s contact database and plugs the name in: Ryan Ratliff.

  Here I come, Billie, he thinks.

  —

  The drive from Berkeley to Santa Cruz seems to take ten minutes; anger keeps his foot heavy on the accelerator. He skids through the curves on Highway 17, veers around the lumbering trucks, whips over the summit and back down the other side. It’s a small miracle that he neither crashes the Prius nor gets pulled over by the police.

  As he drives, his mind churns through an endless list of questions that he wants to ask Billie when he sees her. How could you leave us? Is anything about you real? Was any of this my fault? Why didn’t you trust me enough to tell me the truth about your past? Could we have stopped you if we’d tried? What makes this guy so much more important than us? Are you a sociopath or just a narcissist?

  Did you ever love me? Or was that all an act, too?

  He wonders who he’ll see when he gets to Santa Cruz; if she’ll even be a Billie he recognizes. If she’ll try to spin it all in her favor; if she’ll have the decency to be ashamed. And—the most disturbing thought of all—what if Billie does want Olive back; and what if Olive wants to stay with her mother? What will he do then?

  You had your chance, Billie, he silently glowers. You chose to leave. It’s my turn.

  Once he reaches Santa Cruz, he finds himself in a shaggy neighborhood on the edge of town, cozy but unkempt, a surf village that looks like it’s seen its fair share of keggers. Not where he would have expected to find Billie, but he’s had too many surprises this month to muster up much astonishment.

  Turning onto Madeo Street, he immediately notices the Subaru on the side of the road. He slams on the brakes, skids to a stop behind it. The car is parked in front of a green bungalow. It takes him a minute to place it: peeling paint, a whale flag, bicycles in the yard, a giant oak. It’s the house from that odd series of photos on his wife’s computer. Pieces clicking into place.

  He marches to the front door and rings the doorbell.

  The door swings open before he can even steel himself, and for a moment, he thinks he might be losing his mind. Because it’s Billie standing in front of him. But not Berkeley Mom Billie, with her brown hair cascading around her shoulders, but a much younger Billie, in her mid- to late twenties. A blond duplicate of the girl he met seventeen years earlier. The same cropped pixie hair, the same delicate freckled cheekbones, the same elfin chin. Billie’s dark eyes, wide-set and watching. He’s disoriented, as if he’s stepped into a time machine. Could this be a hallucination, a mirror of the ones that Olive has been experiencing?

  The young woman examines him. “Yeah, can I help you?” she says.

  His voice finally comes back. “I’m looking for Ryan.”

  “Lemme guess, you’re Olive’s dad?” She opens the door wider, an amused smile on her face. Over her shoulder now he can see his daughter, sitting on a futon in the middle of Young Billie’s living room. She jumps up when she sees him.

  “Dad,” Olive says, her eyes bright with excitement. “Mom’s not here, she wasn’t having an affair, you were wrong. We both were. This is Ryan. Dad—I have a sister.”

  —

  You believe what you think you believe, until suddenly, you realize that you don’t anymore. Or maybe you do believe, but it’s no longer convenient to do so, so you decide to forget. You decide to find other beliefs, ones that more comfortably fit the constantly evolving puzzle of your life.

  To put it more finely: There are those beliefs that you will carry with you until the end of your days. A belief in friendliness; a belief in long vacations; a belief in the power of the press and the merits of good coffee. And then there are the beliefs that seem so vital when you are young, but that the passing years steadily leach out of you: a belief in not selling out; a belief in the superiority of the artist; a belief in hardwood floors and staying fit and your ability to change the world. Most of all: a belief that love is forever, that you can climb into a stranger’s heart and know that person and be known in return.

  What remains, after all those beliefs have fallen away, is this: your child. Olive.

  Jonathan sits in a stranger’s living room, his daughter’s hip pressed against his own, and feels like he’s been utterly emptied, a shell of the person he thought he once was. As he looks at this girl in front of him—Ryan, his wife’s child?—he grasps that everything he once believed has been turned inside out and will never quite go back to right. The only thing that he knows is true anymore is that his daughter is here next to him, she is safe, and she needs him even more than he needs her.

  And in this moment, that’s enough.

  They sit across from each other, Olive and Jonathan squeezed together on the futon couch, Ryan sprawled out in an armchair facing them. The bungalow reeks of post-collegiate glory: the sour tang of last night’s party, marijuana wafting from a wooden box on the coffee table, sulfur and red wax from the Mexican prayer candles lined up along the mantel. There is sand in the shag rug and a pair of men’s boxer shorts lying lewdly on the dining room table.

  Stunned silent, Jonathan can’t stop staring at Ryan. He takes inventory: Billie’s thin nose, Billie’s tiny earlobes, Billie’s way of chewing her upper lip when she’s thinking. He looks at Olive and back at Ryan, mentally comparing their features, finding it hard to accept that the stranger in front of him resembles his wife so much more than his own daughter does. The magnitude is hard to absorb: Billie had a kid. Olive has a sister. Billie never told me. What the hell.

  “So Billie is…was…?” he begins.

  “My birth mom,” the girl says quickly. “She gave me up for adoption right after I was born. I started looking for her, let’s see, maybe four years back? Not long after I dropped out of State. I was back at home living with my parents in Fresno, which sucked, and I was having a, you know, life crisis, and I reached out to her, see—left a letter at the agency that arranged the adoption? And I ended up hearing back from my mom’s mom, Grandma Rose. Who was kind of a nutbird, don’t know if you ever met her, but God.” She huffs out a sleepy little laugh. “Literally: God. Anyway, Grandma Rose sent my letter on to my birth mom, but Sybilla didn’t respond to me. And then eventually I moved out here to Santa Cruz and stopped thinking about all that for a while.” She reaches out with a toe and nudges the reeking box on the table, centering it next to a water-stained copy of Surfer magazine.

  “So about a year and a half ago, this private investigator calls me out of the blue and says my birth mom wants to meet me. She’d come around, just needed some time, right?” Her words are drawling, there’s a faraway smile on her face. “But by that point the adoption agency had closed, and Grandma Rose was, you know…senile, so Sybilla had to hire the investigator to track me down.” Her hands fiddle in her lap, folding and refolding the sleeves of her oversize sweatshirt. She rubs her feet against each other; she’s wearing a man’s crew socks that droop off the end of her toes.

  Jonathan realizes that his staring is starting to make
the girl uncomfortable. He tries to drag his gaze away and fails. “And you actually met her? In person?”

  She looks at him like he might be a little bit dim. “Well, of course. We met for dinner at first. And then she started coming down and staying with me weekends. She did that a few times. I taught her to surf. You know, she picked it up crazy fast? She told me she felt at home out there in the waves, said it made her feel truly alive again. I could totally relate to that. That’s why I moved out here, too.” She says this with pride, and then her eyes meet Jonathan’s, and guilt fleetingly crosses her face. He wonders if it has just occurred to her that Billie’s weekends with her must have meant weekends away from them.

  Weekends away from them.

  Things start clicking into place for Jonathan. The missing weekends in Billie’s calendar. The Sex Wax receipt. Calvin Lim. The stalkerish photographs of the bungalow, probably Lim’s handiwork, too. Billie’s emotional distance that last year. And the stay at Motel 6—not to visit her parents, maybe, but an attempt to track down the adoption agency documents. Even the money missing from their bank account: He looks around the battered bungalow, noting the shiny new big-screen TV and the top-of-the-line stereo speakers, quite likely purchased with guilt money siphoned from his own bank account.

  Not an affair, he understands, and it feels like his entire body has just gone light, a boulder lifting off his back. A search for her long-lost daughter. His mind reels. How could he have gotten everything so wrong?

  “And your biological father?” he wonders out loud.

  She shakes her head. “I never met him. She said he was a”—she lowers her voice to a whisper, mouthing the words as if someone might be listening in—“convicted felon. He tried to murder a cop. Not a nice guy.”

  “Sidney,” he says, another piece of the puzzle snapping into position. He wonders if this is what Harmony didn’t want Sidney to tell him the other day—did she know about Ryan’s existence, too? Is this why she was so secretive?

  Ryan seems surprised. “Wait—you know my biodad?”

  “We met him last weekend,” Olive blurts.

  “Jeeeeezus.” Her brow knits itself together as she parses this information. “But Sybilla said he was in jail for life. Not true?” She frowns as they shake their heads. “Huh. Is he as bad as she said he was?”

  Olive glances over at Jonathan. “Well, he is a convicted felon,” she says. “But he seems pretty benign, actually. More pathetic than dangerous.”

  Ryan frowns, her eyes glazing over. “Sybilla said…Are you sure? This is really confusing.” The girl’s eyes wander back over to Olive, and she gazes at her for a long time, thinking. Then she leans forward in her chair, folds her legs underneath her, and really starts talking.

  …About how she was adopted when she was two days old and how her parents never told her, she only found out by accident when she was seventeen (“Aunt Didi got loaded one night and spilled the beans, and boy, did my parents hit the roof”), and how she’d never really forgiven them for this. She and her mom barely speak these days, you know? Though maybe that’s because her mom is still angry at her for dropping out of college; honestly, her mom is just, like, angry at life, she really needs to start doing yoga or meditating or something because she’s so unbearable to be around. The last time her mom visited from Fresno, she had a conniption when she found the vape stashed under the sink, and threatened to stop paying an allowance if Ryan didn’t buckle down and get herself a “real job” (Ryan rolls her eyes at this and jerks her fingers in air quotes). But whatever, she’s happy with her life, hitting the waves in the morning, waitressing at a restaurant in town, hanging with her boyfriend, beach bonfires and house parties, whatever, her parents can deal. She’s only twenty-five, you know? She’s supposed to be having fun.

  So yeah, she’s just hanging out here in Santa Cruz, doing her thing, when she gets the call from a private investigator. And when she meets Sybilla, everything suddenly makes sense. Of course her birth mom would be someone so much cooler than her parents, someone who understands her life choices. She’s the kind of mom Ryan always dreamed of, more of a friend than a parent, you know? When they get together the first time, they stay up all night talking, and it feels like Sybilla is trying to soak up everything from all the years she missed. And then when the sun rises, they walk out to the beach and go surfing together and it’s like a whole new day dawning.

  Olive cuts in again: “My mom’s name carved in the rail at the butterfly beach. Who did that?”

  Ryan’s eyes drift over to Olive’s. She offers a lazy smile. “Oh, we did that together. I carved my name, she carved hers. It’s kind of a thing at that break, you know? You go out when the surf is really firing, you leave your name behind.”

  Jonathan tries to visualize Billie and Ryan kneeling on a staircase, laughing as they hacked at the wooden rail with a Swiss Army knife. He wonders what Billie was thinking during those secret visits. Maybe she regretted giving the child away. Maybe she was nostalgic for the girl she had been. Maybe she was trying to recapture her lost youth, out there in the waves.

  …So anyway (Ryan continues), they get together a few times over the next six months. And Ryan loves hearing about her own history, how she is the result of her mom’s wild-child youth, how her biodad was this dangerous criminal type who coerced her into doing some pretty stupid things. They were living off the grid like renegades, but when Sybilla found out she was pregnant, she knew it wasn’t a good life for a baby. No way she could raise a kid like that, scared of both the baby’s father and getting arrested. So she turned her boyfriend in and fled back to her parents’ house, where she gave birth to Ryan. (Ryan leans in as she tells this part, folding her elbows over her knees and gazing thoughtfully at her socks.) Sybilla gave Ryan up in order to give her a better life, like, the noble sacrifice, you know? But she never stopped thinking about Ryan, not in all those years. The only reason it took her so long to get in touch was that she felt so guilty about her decision to give Ryan away.

  Ryan’s face is glowing, her eyes misting over as if she’s emotionally moved by the drama of her own genesis. Jonathan watches the girl, transfixed, envisioning a twentysomething Billie fleeing Oregon, pregnant and scared and alone. He can’t help wondering about the veracity of this alternate narrative, conveniently painting Billie as an innocent victim rather than the author of her own behavior. Then again, it’s possible that getting pregnant was a wake-up call for Billie, that she felt stuck and saw only one way out. The truth probably lies somewhere between Sidney’s and Billie’s interpretations of events; Jonathan would really never know, would he?

  Maybe she was just a scared pregnant kid, he tells himself. Trying to save her own ass after she made some stupid mistakes.

  His anger is leaking away, and yet a last vestige of doubt clings to him. Billie’s whole last year of her life was a lie, it can’t be ignored; the entirety of their marriage, she was lying. It was fucked up that Billie withheld this critical information from him all these years. But perhaps, he wonders, it was forgivable? After all, it wasn’t a lie of betrayal; it was a lie of omission. A lie born out of shame or insecurity, maybe; a fear that he would hate the person she’d been more than he’d love the person she was now.

  Christ, Billie, he thinks, why did you think you needed to keep all this a secret from me? Did you think I was incapable of understanding? Because I wouldn’t have judged you.

  His mind races through their last year together. No wonder he felt so much distance between them, with all this happening behind his back. Maybe it can even explain why she cheated on him with Sean: some perverse way of flailing against the mess she’d made. He wonders if Billie did try to tell him about Ryan and he didn’t hear her.

  He studies Ryan, wondering: “Did she tell you about us?”

  “Well, yeah.” Ryan looks up to see the both of them staring intently at her, and a flush creeps across her face before she averts her gaze and goes back to studying her socks. “She said s
he was waiting for the right time to tell you about me. That she wasn’t, you know, sure how open you’d be to meeting me.”

  The butterfly beach. Jonathan remembers, now, that day at the beach just a few weeks before Billie died, his wife studying the surfers out at the water’s edge. She brought us here. Maybe she was planning to introduce us and lost her nerve. It’s a consoling thought.

  “You’re the surfer with the McTavish longboard,” Olive interrupts Ryan. “I talked to you on the phone.”

  “You did?” Ryan looks perplexed. “Weird. When?”

  “I showed a picture of Mom to this surfer I met, and he thought you were her.”

  “Oh yeah, I remember that.” Ryan smiles, pleased. “Yeah, Sybilla and I look so much alike, right? Here, check this out—” She jumps up and goes to a drawer, pulls out two photographs, and presents them for examination. One is a faded color snapshot dating back to the seventies, the other a much more recent digital print, but the ponytailed little girls in the photos could be twins if it weren’t for the twenty-odd years that separate them. “I went to visit Grandma Rose at her nursing home earlier this year, and she gave this photo to me. Well, actually, I just took it from her room, but I’m pretty sure she isn’t ever going to notice, if you know what I mean. That’s Sybilla at eight and me at seven. We’re practically identical.” She examines the two photos proudly.

  Ryan keeps talking in circles about how thrilling it was to get to know her biomom, the great times they had together, how alike they turned out to be, repeating anecdotes until it occurs to Jonathan that Ryan might be stoned. The light in the room grows darker as Olive and Jonathan sit there, stupefied, unwilling to break the spell. “Yeah, and then a month went by when she didn’t get in touch with me, and I didn’t know what was going on. Like, was she mad at me or something? But she’d told me not to call or email her because, well…” She gives the two of them a significant look. “But eventually I went online, and even though Sybilla wasn’t on Facebook I looked you two up—I’d done that a few times already, just out of curiosity, right?—and that’s when I came across the video.” She turns to Jonathan. “The one of you talking at her memorial. It was a nice speech. That’s how I found out she died.” She twists away then, looking at the wall, so that he can’t see her face. Her voice goes tiny and soft: “And…yeah. That sucked. I found her just in time to lose her again.”