Watch Me Disappear

by Janelle Brown

  She jumped up then and walked into his office. He could hear her rummaging around in the desk. When she came back, she had a piece of paper in her hands that she thrust at him. He unfolded it, smoothing out the creases—it looked like it had been crumpled once—and read the first line: Hi Sybilla, My name is Ryan Ratliff and I’m the daughter you gave away twenty-one years ago.

  He looked up. “I already know about Ryan,” he said. “You knew?”

  Something flashed in Harmony’s eyes, something self-righteous and smug. “Of course I knew. I knew Billie was pregnant before she did. I went out to visit them in that cabin in the woods and found Billie bent over a toilet, throwing her guts up. She was in denial, but I knew immediately what was going on.” She shook her head. “You’re forgetting, I was her best friend.” She said this emphatically, apparently not seeing the irony. And then her voice abruptly went flat: “Who do you think told Sidney last year that he had a kid he didn’t know about? She sure wasn’t going to.”

  Jonathan clutched Ryan’s letter in stiff fingers. “But how’d you get this letter? Why was it in my desk?”

  “I was here with her the day it arrived.” She pointed to the chair across from her, as if Billie were sitting in it. “We were sitting here drinking wine and chatting while she opened her mail, and all of a sudden she went white as a sheet. I watched her crumple up the letter in her hand and throw it in the trash. When she left the room, I dug it out and saved it. For her sake, you know? Just in case she changed her mind.” Harmony turned away from the disbelief in his face. “I put it in the back of your desk drawer a while ago, after she died, thinking that you’d find it there eventually. You deserved to know, but I didn’t want to be the one to tell you myself. Because I knew you’d shoot the messenger.” Her hands curled into helpless fists on the table. “But don’t you see? Billie always got away with everything. She just did anything she wanted, didn’t give a damn how it affected anyone else. She thought she was so much better than everyone else. Even when she was your best friend, it felt like she was always looking at you and judging, waiting for you to disappoint her so she could have a reason to turn on you. Over twenty-five years she pulled that on me, and like the masochist I am, I just kept coming back for more.”

  “She’s dead,” he said, growing defensive, not liking this side of Harmony at all. “What’s the point in tearing her apart like this?”

  She stared at him and then closed her eyes, inhaling deeply. “God, look at this, Billie is gone, and she’s still undermining my Zen,” she said. Her struggle to realign herself was visible on her face; and then she seemed to give up. She opened her eyes and twisted her lips up in a dark little smile. “You know what? I always wondered if the whole hiking accident thing was a sham. If she just walked off into the sunset in order to avoid dealing with her own messes. Just…disappeared and left us all behind as a big ‘Screw you.’ ”

  He couldn’t stop himself from laughing—the irony was too rich—and when he did, Harmony glared at him. She stood up. “Call me when you come around,” she said, and slammed the door on the way out.

  But he hasn’t called her. He doesn’t think he will. Not that he’s idealizing Billie so much anymore, but because there no longer seems to be a hole in his life that needs to be filled. Maybe it will gape open again once Olive leaves for destinations unknown, but for now the shape of his life feels whole.

  Tonight especially, life feels markedly normal in a way he never would have imagined just a few months earlier. The quinoa is steaming on the stove, and the stir-fry has been loaded onto a platter and transferred to the dinner table, ominously congealing. They are just sitting down for dinner when the doorbell rings. Jonathan and Olive look at each other.

  “Expecting someone?” Jonathan asks.

  “No,” Olive says, getting up.

  When Olive flings the front door open, she is stopped cold. Natalie stands there in her post-badminton sweats, her curly hair wet from the locker room. Olive hasn’t seen her friend (former friend?) in months—not since the day she bailed out of Claremont before first period, never to return—and it feels as if Natalie has just surfaced out of a time capsule, weirdly unchanged. And yet her friend’s hair is a fraction shorter, she’s wearing an unfamiliar pair of vintage Bakelite earrings, she’s lost a little weight. Looking at Natalie, Olive experiences a sudden melancholy as she realizes there are all these moments with Natalie that she’s already missed and will never get back.

  Natalie is holding Olive’s science fair project of a wind turbine, freckled with dust from its prolonged stay in the Claremont Girls display case. She thrusts the model toward Olive. “They were changing out the display. I thought you might want it.”

  Olive takes it and stares down at the cardboard model, finding it easier to examine its fading green paint and peeling electrical tape than to meet Natalie’s eyes. “You could have trashed it. I honestly don’t care.”

  “Oh,” Natalie says, but she doesn’t reach to take it back. There’s an awkward silence that Olive doesn’t feel compelled to try to fill. She checks herself—waiting to be overwhelmed by anger or longing or love—but she mostly feels scraped empty, as if the drag of time has cleared out any excess emotion.

  Natalie tucks a damp curl behind her ear, smoothing it nervously into place. “So,” she says. “How’s Berkeley High?”

  Olive shrugs. “I like it,” she says. “I’m at the top of my class for a change.”

  “That’s great.” Natalie says this with a little too much emphasis. “And people are being nice to you? Because I’ve heard the students there can be really, well, judgey.”

  “They aren’t nearly as bad as the girls at Claremont.” The words bite so sharply that Natalie flinches. “Look, we need to talk about how you outed me. Totally unacceptable.”

  “No, you’re right. I’m sorry.” Natalie fixes her gaze on her UGGs. “I should have kept my mouth shut. But in my defense, I thought I was doing you a favor by telling Dominique. Sometimes it’s not so bad to have a label, right? So you can find your people, you know, solidarity; and a common vocabulary to talk about your oppression? We talked about that in gender studies last month.”

  “I’m not feeling particularly oppressed,” Olive observes. “And I’m also not interested in anyone’s labels.”

  “Oh.” Natalie looks at her for a long time, a funny expression on her face. “I heard through the grapevine that you’ve got a girlfriend now.”

  Olive feels herself blushing and puts a hand up to cover her cheek. “I don’t know if I’d say girlfriend, exactly.” She’s still getting used to this, being out, her gayness just another normal facet of life. She imagined that transferring to a new high school midway through junior year would mean she’d been granted a blank slate; a chance for reinvention. But the funny thing was how little she felt like she’d changed—as if there really always was something innately Olive, something that she hadn’t been able to pinpoint before. (She’s still not entirely sure she could, and yet it’s there.) The most marked differences were that she walked into her first Berkeley High Gay-Straight Alliance meeting without feeling like a fraud; that she met the eyes of a pretty girl with smooth coffee skin, her name tag reading ALEXIA, and felt a familiar flush; and instead of pushing the feeling away, she leaned right into it. Lesbian, bisexual, straight: The words weren’t the important part. The only important part was that she could see what she wanted now.

  She sometimes thinks back to the moment when Ryan opened the door that day in Santa Cruz, the disappointment she felt when she realized that she’d come to a dead end. That the path to her mother hadn’t actually led to her mother after all. That there were no answers to be found there, at least not the kind of answers she’d been expecting. And then the dawning understanding as she sat there next to her father and listened to Ryan talk: Your mother is gone, and it is all up to you now. You can’t count on anyone else to show you who you are and how everything fits together.

  Three months
later, she’s finally starting to feel OK with this. She understands now that no matter how hard you try to see yourself—through someone else’s eyes or from right inside your own brain—it’s impossible to really assemble all the pieces and understand them clearly as one thing. In the same way that you can never get a true grasp on the entirety of the universe, regardless of your position inside it. Life is messy like that, she supposes.

  She told her father about Alexia right after Christmas. “I’m glad you told me,” he said, and hugged her. “Whatever you are is fine by me, as long as you’re happy.” It occurred to her that this was the right answer, and the one she might never have been given by her mother.

  There are still days when she violently misses Billie, when she feels like there are things that she’ll never understand, and she wishes her visions would come back so she could at least try to talk all this out with her mom. But she hasn’t taken Depakote since November, and she’s seen nothing at all. The doctor says the bruise on her brain healed, although Olive prefers to believe that once she saw what she needed to see, once the interconnection of everything was revealed and they met Ryan, an invisible circuit shut itself off. Every once in a while, she’ll still get that feeling—that Billie is lingering somewhere just offscreen, waiting for her cue to speak—but for now, her mother has vanished. The only person Olive can feel in her head is herself; although she’s aware that her mom will always be there somewhere, tangled up inside her.

  Right now, on her front doorstep, Natalie is looking like she’s about to cry. “Claremont sucks without you,” she says. “Ming is mean, and Tracy isn’t exactly firing on all cylinders. I miss you.”

  Olive takes this in with a pang of satisfaction, realizing how much power she holds in the moment. It’s a curious sensation that she’s not entirely sure she enjoys. “Me, too,” she says shyly. It’s almost like her friend on her porch is a stranger, and they’re starting all over again. “Maybe we can hang out sometime. You, me, and Alexia.”

  “Really? That’d be great.” Natalie grins, and her mouth lights up with a gleaming new set of braces.

  From inside, Olive can hear her father calling that dinner is getting cold. Out here, the crickets are starting to chirp. The night is clear and cold, a half-moon pressing down on them from above, stars visible over the pale glow of the urban grid. The porch light behind Olive casts her shadow out toward the street, as if illuminating a path forward. She senses her life expanding, on the verge of dividing into two, into three, into a hundred divergent directions. Any one of them a choice that might preclude any other; any one a possible dead end. How will she ever know if she went the right way? How will she know who she might have been if she chose a different route?

  But that’s something to worry about tomorrow. Right now there’s only one clear place that she wants to be.

  “I gotta go, my dad’s waiting for me,” she tells her friend. Then she turns back toward her house, where her father waits in the dining room, the table set for two. “OK, I’m coming!”

  IT’S MID-MORNING WHEN she stops at the lookout where the two trails fork. The view over Desolation Valley is spectacular here—the icy blue lakes set into the forest below, the blinding snowcapped peaks above, the barren fields of granite casting ancient fingers toward the sky. Billie stands there, the sweat pooling between her breasts, and allows herself to cool down for just a minute.

  Although the ground beneath her boots is soft from the week’s rains, the mountains up ahead are already frosted with snow. The air up here is thin and cold, and her lungs burn with each breath. She doesn’t mind it. Nor does it bother her that the pack on her shoulders is particularly heavy, that even with the padding, it’s biting into her lumbar so deeply that she already has a bruise across the tops of her hips. She knows how to lean into pain; it’s just another challenge to conquer, proof that you’re alive.

  She unclips her canteen and drinks from it while she consults her map. There: The trail dead-ends at the waterfall, about 1.5 miles ahead. Beyond it, miles of wilderness leading north toward the pleasure boats and casinos of South Lake Tahoe.

  A pair of hikers appear over the horizon, coming down the trail toward her. The first people she’s encountered all day—it’s late in the season to be out here—and she’s pleased to see them. She lifts a hand in greeting and waits for them to approach. They are half her age, at least, probably post-college, the girl’s high-pitched voice slashing through the silence as they pick their way down the mountain. Billie can hear empty beer bottles clanking in the boy’s backpack with each step he takes.

  When they get within earshot, she points to her map. “How far ahead is the waterfall?” she calls.

  The girl smiles, self-consciously tucking stray blond hairs into her ponytail. “Two miles, maybe three? I’m bad with distances. What do you think, Matt?” She turns eagerly to the boyfriend for validation. He shrugs. The girl looks Billie up and down and furrows her brow. “It’s a really tough hike.”

  “Oh, I can handle it,” Billie says breezily, and smiles at the girl, thinking, I’m probably in better shape than you are, kiddo. “Anyone else up there?”

  “Nope,” the boyfriend says, absorbed with kicking the mud off his new-looking hiking boots. His face is as thick and florid as Play-Doh. Beer for breakfast, fat by forty, Billie thinks.

  The girl persists. “There’s ice up at the pass. I almost bit it twice on the rocks. Are you out here by yourself?”

  “Yes,” Billie says, her smile slipping.

  “There’s no cell reception out there, you know,” the girl warns her.

  “Well, I wasn’t planning on texting anyone anyway.” Billie blinks as she remembers the way her cellphone skittered down the side of the cliff when it slipped out of her hands the previous evening: nearly soundless against the all-consuming void of the wilderness. She peered over the edge of the rocks for a long time, finally spotting the shattered glass glittering in the sun, before continuing on. “But don’t worry about me. I like hiking alone. It gives your thoughts the room they deserve, don’t you think? That’s why I come out here. Nice and quiet.”

  The boyfriend finally glances up to meet Billie’s eyes with a flash of recognition. “Quiet, huh? Lucky you.”

  The girl swats her boyfriend’s arm with the back of her hand, absentmindedly, as if this is something they do a dozen times a day. “I totally get it,” she says. “Anyway. The hike is worth it. The falls are moving fast right now. It’s stunning.”

  Billie murmurs enthusiastically and then watches them go, wondering what kind of an impression she made on them. The girl will remember her, though the boy was already erasing her from his brain before he turned away, just like he clearly plans to erase his girlfriend from his life as soon as they get to the bottom of the mountain. She laughs to herself: Empty-headed children.

  She waits until they have disappeared down the trail before lifting her pack and settling it back on her hips; then she turns and picks her way up the rocky path toward the summit.

  She’d almost forgotten how glorious it is to be solitary like this, self-reliant, off the grid. How long has it been? Nearly twenty-five years since Oregon; but back then she wasn’t alone so much, there were always sleeping bags on the floor, too many unwashed bodies living in too close proximity. Maybe those years of backpacking the world after Oregon went bad. She can still summon that feeling of exhilaration: the stale bun on the empty train carriage, the solo trek down dusty roads toward a town that didn’t even merit a paragraph in the guidebooks, the possibility of reinvention and dominion.

  Since Olive and Jonathan, she’s barely been solitary at all. That’s not to say that she’s never alone in Berkeley—in fact, she has been too much alone recently, with Jonathan working those outrageous hours and Olive evasive, behaving as if the two of them are magnets that have unexpectedly had their polarities reversed—but that is not a solitude of her own choosing, not a solitude into which you can expand. No, that is a solitude that smacks
of rejection, of abandonment.

  There have been too many times in the last few years when Billie has found herself standing at the kitchen sink looking out at the twilight, just waiting for something to happen, feeling the emptiness around her like a suffocating blanket. Aware that the undiluted adulation of husband and child in which she’d once basked—the unexpected flowers, the hand-scrawled notes (“You are the best mommy EVER!”)—was slowly vanishing. Invisible, scraped raw with frustration, she’d stand there and remind herself: She chose to be here. She could have done anything she wanted—been an activist, an artist, someone who did big things—and she selected this for herself. Selected this, conquered this, and did this outstandingly well.

  And yet she felt herself in danger of losing jurisdiction over her own life. She wasn’t entirely sure that this wasn’t starting to conquer her.

  Just this last spring, at a routine doctor visit, her gynecologist casually asked her if she’d noticed any early signs of menopause. “You’re at the age,” the doctor said, handing her a pamphlet. “You need to pay attention.” Menopause! The very thought made her dizzy.

  After he left the room, she stood there for a long time, examining herself in the reflective metal of the industrial cabinets. With his words echoing in her head, those years of self-assured low maintenance—a beauty routine consisting of moisturizer and a flick of mascara, the confidence that she needed nothing more than a fit body and a sharp mind—now seemed like a rifle shot across the bow of an incoming battleship. She was going to get old. Things were starting to end for her rather than begin. As she stared at her warped reflection, she glimpsed a crone standing at the kitchen sink, a cooling cup of tea in her hand, as Death barreled down on her.