Watch Me Disappear

by Janelle Brown

  He studies the poor girl, pitying her—how awful to learn about your birth mother’s death on Facebook. The futon is shaking and he looks over to see tears on Olive’s face, her body heaving with silent sobs. She grips his arm. “Mom’s really gone,” she gasps. Her damp eyes search his. “Isn’t she? She’s dead. For real this time.”

  Jonathan nods. The release in this sudden clarity washes over him, relief and exhaustion leaving him limp. He reaches over and puts an arm around his daughter; she lets him pull her into his embrace. He feels his own eyes well up in concert with his daughter’s, and reproaches himself for having poisoned the memory of his dead wife with so much resentment and recrimination. Billie was no saint, but who is? She was flawed like any human. Yes, he has every right to be angry about the lies and the infidelity, but it isn’t fair for him to make that the whole story. She wasn’t good or bad, he decides: Life is more complicated than that, there are endless shades of gray that comprise a human being. Billie was a loving mom, a thoughtful wife, she brought magic and joy into their lives. Why not remember her for those things rather than staying bitter about her failings?

  Besides, isn’t this ultimately how he’d prefer to remember their life together, too? The choice is his, and this is what he is going to choose: a loving family, an often happy marriage, the woman he fell in love with. He had all those things, he felt those feelings. It’s a truth, it’s his truth; and if he’s learned anything by this point, it’s that truth can be subjective.

  When he looks up, he sees that Ryan is looking at Olive with a strange stricken expression, as if it has finally occurred to her that Olive might be grieving, too. “You OK?” she asks awkwardly. “Here, look, I’ll get you a tissue.” She hurls herself out of the chair and pads into the other room, socks flapping. A fan goes on in the bathroom; he can hear her blowing her nose.

  Olive leans her head on Jonathan’s shoulder, snuffling softly, swiping at her nose with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. After a moment, she sits upright. “Dad,” she says. “I get it now.”

  “Get what?”

  She looks at him with an expression of wonder that makes him nervous. “Don’t you see? This is what I was supposed to look for all along. Not for Mom. For my sister. That’s what Mom was telling me when I saw her in my visions. She wanted us to find Ryan. She led us here. She wanted us to know about Ryan because she didn’t get the chance to tell us before she died.”

  He nods thoughtfully, as if this makes perfect sense; because what else is he going to do? He might as well let Olive have this one if it makes her feel better.

  By the time Ryan returns to the room, holding out a bedraggled tissue packet, Olive has stopped crying. “You should come stay with us in Berkeley sometime,” she tells Ryan. “We should get to know each other.”

  “Really?” Ryan stops mid-stride; the hand holding the tissue packet falters. “Um, wow. That’s nice of you. You know, Sybilla told me she wasn’t sure how you guys would react to my existence. That you might be kind of pissed. When she died—I wanted to come pay my respects but I was afraid to just show up….”

  Olive stands up, ignoring the tissue packet in Ryan’s hand. Instead, she lunges forward across the coffee table and wraps her arms around her sister. From his vantage point on the futon, Jonathan can see the look that crosses Ryan’s face: It’s one of confusion, even mild panic, as if strangers have just intruded on her favorite fantasy and are insisting on a whole new ending.

  “I’m sure this is what Mom would have wanted,” Olive says, her voice muffled in Ryan’s shoulder. “For all of us to be together. Right, Dad?”

  There are moments when you look at your child and suddenly see a stranger there whom you never saw before, someone destined for things you can’t even imagine. And you think: How did they become this person? Were they molded by you or by the world around them or were they always going to be this way? As Jonathan looks at Olive, he glimpses a woman who has the possibility of being a better person than either he or Billie proved to be. Maybe she won’t remain this woman forever; he knows that life might someday drain this out of her. But in this moment, he cannot imagine being more proud of the person she promises to be.

  “Of course,” he says, willing it into truth. “We’d love to have you.”

  Olive turns to smile at him, releasing a startled Ryan from her embrace. Olive’s cheeks are still mottled from crying and her eyes are rimmed with pink, but Jonathan notices only the new focus in her expression. It’s as if she’s finally stopped trying to see something that’s behind him and is looking straight at him for the first time in months, maybe all year. Her smile is an invitation: We did this together.

  It takes all the self-control he can muster not to drop to his knees right there and weep with relief.

  I used to believe there was some innate truth about Billie that I might discover by writing about her, like mounting a butterfly on a board and assigning it a classification and a taxonomy, fixing it forever in place. I conveniently forgot that you can’t really do that with a person.

  After Billie died, I spent a long time idealizing her. That’s what you do when someone’s gone. You remember only the best parts of them. You reassemble your memories to forget all their flaws, all the fights you had, the things about them that you really kind of hated. It makes your grief feel more powerful to forget how human they were and how human you were with them. Maybe it even assuages your guilt to forget all the dysfunctional parts of your relationship and all the pointless, petty grievances you held against them.

  I think Billie wanted me to idealize her, too, which is why she kept the most unpleasant parts of herself hidden. She couldn’t bear to be seen as less than perfect.

  But all these months on, I know that if there’s any truth to be found about my wife, it’s that she contained multitudes. The Billie that I met on the bus; the Billie that blew up dams in Oregon; the Billie that devoted herself to our daughter; the Billie that hid the existence of the child she gave away: These were all the same woman, just viewed from a different tilt of the mirror.

  I chose this woman. I didn’t want to be with someone who was easy to pin down: I loved her because she was the challenge that felt right for me.

  On the morning that Billie went off hiking in Desolation Wilderness, I woke up before dawn and saw her standing silhouetted in the doorway of our bedroom, already wearing her hiking gear. She was holding a cup of coffee, just watching me.

  I pushed myself upright, squinting in the darkness. “What time is it?”

  “Early. Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.” She came closer and sat down on the edge of the bed, handing me the coffee. “I’m leaving in a minute.”

  I’ve always wondered if I had a premonition that morning, because suddenly I was wide awake and feeling an urge to push back against her. She was leaving us again, and I was tired of it. “Don’t go,” I said, reaching out to pull her toward me. She smelled like sunscreen and bananas, a whiff of laundry detergent and ancient sweat from the bandanna tied around her neck.

  She resisted me, teasing: “Why not?”

  “Because. We need you here.”

  “No you don’t,” she laughed. “I left two casseroles in the fridge, and anyway, you always order in pizza when I’m gone.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  She was silent. Her eyes glittered in the reflection from the hallway light. “So what did you mean?”

  I thought about this. Our relationship had been tumultuous for a while; maybe we were starting to heal, but maybe wounds were festering under the Band-Aids we’d slapped on top. Was I willing to peel them back and take a look? Would I still love her if I did?

  “I want you here,” I finally clarified.

  “Ah. That’s something completely different.” She smiled faintly and sat there for a long time. I couldn’t read her face in the dark. Then she leaned in to give me a kiss before pulling away and standing up. “I’m pretty sure you’re going to be fine without me.”
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br />   Only now, after all this time, is it starting to feel possible that she was right.

  You could say that I know more about Billie today than I did on that morning when she slid off our bed and picked up her backpack; or maybe I know her less. My portrait of her has expanded, grown blurry in places, sharper in others, diluted by the details everyone else keeps adding to the picture. But she will always be the woman I loved. She will always be the love that I lost.

  JONATHAN SITS ON the back porch with his laptop, soaking up the last lingering rays of a rare February sunset as he labors over the final pages of Where the Mountain Meets the Sky. The prime spot where Billie’s easel once stood now houses a double-wide lounge chair that Olive and Jonathan dragged home from the Alameda flea market a few weeks back. The easel itself has been exiled to the garage, along with the painting that will never be finished: out of sight but not entirely forgotten.

  The new draft of Where the Mountain Meets the Sky is a better book than the one he threw away last fall, Jonathan thinks as he reads it through one last time: more honest, even if he has still glossed over the ugliest aspects of their last years together. He’s added in the existence of Ryan, but chose not to mention Billie’s infidelity with Sean. Written about some of their more painful fights; removed the angrier passages that made his editor wince. A year from now, as the memoir creeps its way up the New York Times bestseller list, he’ll be able to read the reviews—“Flanagan frames his marriage as an anti-mythic love story, one that reveals how even true love is inextricably intertwined with both doubt and loss”—without a twinge of guilt about what he left out. By that point, his memories of the month when he thought that his wife might have faked her own death will have faded.

  For now, though, he closes the file and composes a quick email: Jeff, take a look through the final MS. And tell my editor thanks for giving this a second chance. I think he’ll be pleased with the results.

  He hits Send just as the sun vanishes over the fence, and carries his computer into the dining room, where Olive is hunched over her trigonometry textbook, a pencil anchored between her teeth. Recently, she has taken to doing her homework downstairs, near where Jonathan has been feverishly revising his book: a transition that happened without comment and yet has not gone unappreciated by Jonathan. Maybe a different parent would be alarmed by a father and child sitting side by side and staring at separate screens, the silence broken only by the rattling of their keyboards; Jonathan knows that this particular quiet is not a divide but a bond, one that doesn’t need words to fill in the space.

  This, doing their work together, is just one of the new routines that have slowly developed over the last few months since they found Ryan—fresh patterns naturally evolving now that they’ve both accepted the fact that their family is two rather than two and one that’s gone. They’ve started cooking dinner together, and going to the movies on Friday nights. Ryan has even driven up to visit them twice, but despite the best intentions of all involved, it’s not so easy to turn a stranger into a family member, especially one who shows up stoned for dinner and talks primarily about herself.

  Another thing that’s changing too fast: With Olive’s senior year in sight, the mailman has begun carpeting their foyer daily with a fresh layer of college catalogs. Jonathan collects these and leaves them in a stack on the entry table, where they are mostly going ignored. Olive is far more interested in a different set of brochures: “International Service Abroad Programme,” “Global Routes for Good,” “Gap Year in the Galápagos.” She has started leaving these in strategic places where he’ll see them. Photographs of tan, shiny college-age kids digging latrines or replanting rain forests or standing among groups of smiling indigenous children while holding a lemur. Lots of endangered tortoises, no textbooks.

  A gap year: Jonathan is trying to be OK with it. The Ivy-minded counselors at Claremont Prep would have tried to talk her out of it, but Berkeley High—where Olive has been enrolled since November—has a much more liberal attitude about potential futures. There are days when he imagines how painful it’s going to be to put her on a plane—likely to land in some village halfway around the globe, a place with no decent hospitals or reliable Internet service—but this is the price of parenthood. Really, he’s pleased that she’s found something to call her own. He was afraid that the events of the last year might have drained some of the idealism out of her, but instead, she’s doubled down. Sudanese famine victims, Guatemalan children, Darwinian finches: Olive is out to rescue them all. Maybe she even will.

  “I just sent off the book to my agent,” he says now as he sits down next to Olive at the dining room table. “Feel like celebrating?”

  Olive looks up, the gnawed pencil drooping wetly from her mouth. “Crack open the champagne?”

  “More like let’s walk up to Ici’s for a cone after dinner.”

  She nibbles thoughtfully on the pencil. “So. When can I read it?”

  “Whenever you’re ready.” He hesitates. “You sure you want to? It might not be so easy to take.”

  “Nothing this year has been easy to take, Dad.” Her sober eyes latch on to his.

  He nods and looks down at her homework as he blinks away the sudden emotion washing over him. “What is this, trig? Need any help?”

  “What do you know about ambiguous triangles?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Jesus, Dad. You’re useless.” She smiles at him. “Forget it. I’m hungry, anyway. Let’s make dinner.”

  He follows her into the kitchen and begins emptying the refrigerator onto the counter. Olive has recently decided to upgrade to veganism, which has necessitated a whole new culinary regime that Jonathan is unwilling to tackle on his own. The new negotiated deal requires Olive to provide the recipes, Jonathan to provide the ingredients, and the cooking to be embarked upon jointly. Tonight it’s quinoa-kale-tofu stir-fry, a rather curdy mess that Olive determinedly pokes at with a spatula and Jonathan, more skeptical, lashes heavily with flavor-obscuring soy sauce. Their bodies ricochet off each other as they bump around the stove in the fading evening light, still unpracticed at their kitchen pas de deux.

  Olive spins around to prod at the tofu and manages to collide with her father, sending a spray of soy sauce across both of their fronts.

  Jonathan looks with mock dismay at his dripping arm. “That’s a foul,” he says. “Two-point penalty.” He leans over and pretends to wipe his arm clean on his daughter’s shirt.

  She pulls away, laughing. “Hey, now I have to change. I was going to wear this tonight.”

  “Hot date?” He raises an eyebrow.

  She blushes as Jonathan grabs a sponge and wipes at her cuff, making the mess even worse. “I have to do laundry anyway,” he says. “I’ll throw it in.”

  The laundry doesn’t actually need to be done, which is a point of pride for Jonathan: He has finally eked out a conquest over the state of their house. The fridge is stocked; the toilet paper rolls are full; the property tax bills have been paid early. The bananas in the bowl on the counter are perfectly ripe, not even a black spot.

  This has been accomplished, in part, by the hiring of a weekly housekeeper, Jonathan’s very first splurge when the life insurance check finally arrived in mid-December. The rest of that money—minus the significant chunk that went to pay off the bills and Marcus’s loan—is sitting in a bank account until he figures out what to do with it. Billie’s death certificate itself is stored in the fireproof lockbox in his bedroom, although now that they have the document in hand, it feels far less significant than it felt when they didn’t.

  Billie’s death certificate, it turns out, looks just like her birth certificate. After it arrived in the mail, Jonathan paired the twinned documents in a folder, the two of them marking the beginning and the end of Billie’s life, the meager space between them representing everything she’d actually lived. He sat staring at the two pieces of paper for a long time, feeling something melancholy leak out of him, and then he slipped the folde
r in a manila envelope.

  I forgive you, Billie, he thought; and even if angels didn’t then sing down from above, bestowing peace and serenity upon him, it still felt pretty good.

  The only real fallout from the last few months has been his breakup with Harmony. Jonathan did this shortly after meeting Ryan in Santa Cruz, in an uncomfortable conversation that went south surprisingly fast. “I’m still not ready for a committed relationship, and I know Olive isn’t ready for me to be in one,” he told her gently as they sat at his kitchen table that day. “Frankly, I’m not even sure that you and I got together for the right reasons, considering all the tangled history we have. Being with you—well, it just feels too much like I’m living in the past.”

  He’d expected Harmony to be rightfully hurt but also understanding and forgiving, centered about it all. But the pink flush drained from Harmony’s face, as if the plug had been yanked from a bathtub. “You’re kidding,” she said flatly. “It’s still all about Billie? Even now?”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way—” he began.

  “Fuck her,” she interrupted. She dropped her hands to the table as she sat bolt upright, her eyes bright with anger. “I spent so much time this last year protecting you from her crap, do you know that? Keeping my mouth shut about everything I knew about her because it wasn’t fair to you, it would just hurt you when you were already hurting. Waiting for you to figure it all out for yourself, what Billie was really like. But you haven’t, have you? Despite it all. You still have Billie up on this pedestal, just, like, worshipping her.”