Watch Me Disappear

by Janelle Brown

  No. She spread her palm over her face and blocked out the reflection.

  On her way out of the doctor’s office, she impulsively grabbed a handful of complimentary condoms from the jar by the door. Let them fester in her purse, until she ran into Sean at the Elmwood Café a few days later, and he gave her that steady up-and-down look he always gave her—his face twitchy but handsome, his breath hot and meaty in her face. And then, instead of stepping away and putting him in his place, as she usually did, she stepped straight toward him. Thinking, Fuck you, crone. Thinking, I refuse to let go of myself. Thinking (of course) of Harmony and her perpetual youthful naïveté, her unwavering faith that the people she loved would always love her back in the way she deserved.

  This is what the world is really like, Harmony, she thought as Sean put his hand on her knee in the front seat of his vintage Mercedes. You have to take and take until the moment when no one wants to give to you anymore; and at that moment you will know that you are finished. But until that point, you never, ever relinquish control.

  Sean wasn’t really worth her time, sexually speaking—she’d forgotten how lackluster and formal those sorts of casual encounters could be, and she found herself having to fantasize about Jonathan in order to enjoy it at all—but that wasn’t the point of the exercise. She slipped out of Sean’s bed that day exhilarated and renewed, reassured that life wasn’t all over for her just yet. She could still be a locus of attraction and intrigue, the world circling dizzily around her. She retrieved her bra off the floor while Sean snored; and then she thought better of it and left it there. For Harmony’s sake: She needed to know what kind of person she was choosing to waste her energies on. Billie was willing to martyr herself upon that berm; she was that kind of good friend.

  There is snow by the side of the trail by the time she reaches the mountain pass. Billie breathes heavily, the air too sparse to really fill her lungs. She’s rising toward the tree line now, her feet moving from the soft dirt of the forest to the granite of the peaks. The tread of her beloved old hiking boots has worn too thin, and she struggles to get traction on the slick rock. There’s a new pair of boots at the bottom of her backpack, but she’s not yet ready to let go of the old ones, which feel like slippers on her feet. She picks each step carefully, aware of the dangers of losing her footing.

  She slows down to maneuver her way over an icy stretch of the trail and hears the thunder of the waterfall ahead. It’s not far at all now. Her stomach is churning itself in a sickly knot; she realizes that she hasn’t eaten a thing since the bagel that she devoured at dawn this morning while breaking down her camp. She’s weak, a little shaky from low blood sugar.

  A few minutes later, she comes around an outcropping, and there it is: a river of water crashing down the side of the mountain, a misty horse’s tail dropping almost a thousand feet down a vertical wash of granite. The air here is so thick with the droplets thrown up by the falls that when she touches her face, her hand comes away wet. She can see jagged slicks of ice in the shady spots under the overhanging boulders.

  The trail has deposited her about twenty yards below the crest of the falls. She peers down the mountain to where the water vanishes into a ravine below, and then begins picking her way up the slippery path toward the top.

  There, she clambers from rock to rock until she finds a flat area overlooking the rapids and digs into her backpack for a granola bar and some dried mango. The river here is wide and fast, clogged with boulders and tree limbs that didn’t quite make it over the falls. She sits there for a long time, watching the water cascade over the side of the mountain, letting the bracing Sierra air clear out the cobwebs in her brain.

  All year long, she believed that the shift in her perspective had been triggered the moment when she’d climbed in bed with Sean. But from up here, from this loftier vantage point, she can see that everything actually started changing when Sidney unexpectedly showed up in the Bay Area.

  She never imagined that Sidney would get out of jail and track her down, for God’s sake. For years, she believed that she’d disappeared herself so completely that this part of her past would never catch up to her. Who would look at Billie Flanagan, Berkeley supermom, and see Sparrow the ecoterror turncoat? Well, Harmony, of course: She knew Billie in all her adult iterations, which made her dear but also dangerous, which was why Billie kept her close—letting Harmony be her best friend and confidante, keeper of her secrets—even if she often couldn’t bear Harmony’s neediness. Otherwise, the only people who knew anything real about that part of her history were the pair of buffoons who were safely locked up in prison and the loony bin.

  It’s not that she felt she’d done the wrong thing up there in Oregon. Not at all: She’d merely done what any rational person would do. The initial righteous thrill of blowing up that dam had turned so quickly, with Sidney on his heroin-fueled high and Vincent cresting the far edge of sanity. She’d always known that what they were doing required total rigor—that’s why she had dispatched Harmony back to U of O early on, before she could screw things up in that timorous way of hers: Harmony never did have the steeliness necessary for decisive action. But then Sidney and Vincent had grown reckless and sloppy, too, and Billie was stuck in a cabin with them in the middle of nowhere—no TV, no telephone, not even a radio—listening to their increasingly ludicrous plans. Wild mustangs? A ski resort? They even started talking about kidnapping a BLM officer, for chrissake. She’d created a monster.

  And then, to make everything worse, she got pregnant. She was so distracted by the looming disaster of Sidney that she hadn’t even put two and two together until Harmony showed up unannounced at the cabin (grocery bags in her arms, Just checking on you guys!, but clearly hoping to be invited into the inner sanctum). When Harmony pointed out what should have been obvious—Billie wasn’t just sick, she had morning sickness—Billie was horrified: How was she going to find an abortion clinic in the middle of the Cascades? Harmony, proving herself truly useful, had returned a week later with a basket full of pennyroyal and tansy tea, but the abortifacients only made Billie sicker. By then it was too late to deal with the problem any other way. Soon Sidney was going to notice her tiny swelling belly, and knowing him, he’d want to keep their kid.

  So now she was stuck having a baby; and stuck with two unreliable clowns who were inevitably going to get caught doing something illegal. It was growing quite clear: They were going to take her down with them. If Billie wasn’t the one to go to the police, she would be the one in jail someday, permanently tethered to the father of this child she didn’t want. She wasn’t about to take that risk, so yes, she opted for self-preservation: made the call, took their money, and fled. She cleaned herself up before going to the police, smiled, flirted, cried, and the cops applauded her for “being so brave” and “doing the right thing.” Sidney, bless his heart, had the integrity not to implicate her, just like she’d known he would. Vincent—well, he was nuts, who would listen to him? In no time at all, she’d shed Elizabeth Smith and Sparrow and disappeared back into Sybilla Thrace, a temporary way station on the way to bigger and better things.

  You could say that this was a betrayal—Sidney certainly did when he finally found out what had happened—but really, if Sidney hadn’t gone to jail and sobered up, he’d probably be dead by now. And Vincent needed to be hospitalized. So really, she did them both a favor.

  She was shocked when she first saw Sidney last winter. He had become such a small person, a shadow of the magnetic rebel with whom she had fled the toxic backwater that was Meacham so many years ago. Working as a furniture mover, tending his houseplants in an apartment that smelled like cat piss. When he called her up out of the blue last January, wanting to talk about “old times,” she figured he just wanted money. And she did owe him that, so she happily starting throwing him a few hundred bucks here and there, figuring a little generosity was a good strategy: She needed him grateful and quiet.

  Maybe that would have been the end of it if she
hadn’t slept with Sean. And if Harmony, in a surprising little burst of vindictiveness, hadn’t then gone and told Sidney everything: about Billie’s betrayal back in Oregon; and worse, about the existence of the baby.

  All those years and Billie had never been particularly interested in meeting the daughter she gave away. Not even when her mother hunted her down years earlier and said she’d received a letter through the adoption agency, written by a girl named Ryan. At the time Billie saw this for what it was—Rose’s only ammunition, her pathetic end-of-life attempt to reel her daughter back in—and hung up on her mother. After all, she’d put the baby out of her mind the minute she pushed her out of her body: Even then she knew there was no point in sabotaging her future for the sake of a child who would inevitably be better off without her. So when Ryan’s letter arrived in the mail, Billie threw it away.

  But now, thanks to Sidney, the membrane between her past and her present had been pierced, and everything was threatening to pour through: the events she had long ago put behind her, the personas she had discarded. When Sidney started demanding that she put him in touch with “his daughter”—or else he’d tell Jonathan and Olive all about her ignoble history, “and how are they going to feel about you after that?”—she sensed that things were spinning out of her control.

  She wasn’t used to feeling powerless. She didn’t like the sensation at all.

  Maybe she should have told Jonathan the full truth about her history when she first met him, but she was worried that it would drive him away. It was as if she’d conjured him up out of nowhere, that day on the J Church, just when she needed him: The Oregon money was long gone, she was exhausted and alone, and he was ready to scoop her up and take care of her. No one had ever done that for her before, at least not someone so admirable and kind and good. She’d surprised herself by falling in love with him, and she wasn’t going to risk all that by giving him a reason to dislike her. So she gave him half her life story, just enough to hew to the truth but leaving out the most unflattering details. What would she gain by doing anything different?

  Still, she probably should have told Jonathan everything then; because she knew if it came out now, the situation was going to be far, far worse.

  Already, her life in Berkeley felt like it was tearing apart at the seams. She and Jonathan had been growing more and more distant lately; the ambitious, passionate boy who’d thrillingly proposed to her after just six weeks had been siphoned away into a passive workaholic. She’d cheated on him, for chrissake, something she’d never felt compelled to do; and he, in turn, was starting to look at her with something alarming in the set of his mouth, something that looked almost like distaste. How long before Jonathan started demanding couples counseling and date night and all the other life preservers thrown to desperate, sad marriages on their way toward divorce? The thought made her queasy.

  And then, most critically of all, there was Olive. Her beautiful daughter, her reassurance every time Billie looked at her life and questioned what she’d done with it: because she’d accomplished Olive. All these years she’d prided herself that her relationship with her daughter was not typical; that even when Olive hit puberty, there would surely be no screaming fights, no surly withdrawal, no withholding of love. She was wrong. Olive had been steadily pulling away ever since they enrolled her in Claremont; and Billie’s latest attempt to reestablish their bond—that mother-daughter Muir Trail hike in September—had only made things worse. Olive had behaved like a petulant child, they’d fought, and when Billie had tried to smooth things over, she’d felt her daughter recoil from a hug. As if repulsed by her very touch.

  She knew, at that moment, that this was the beginning of the end: that soon, if not already, Olive would be complaining about her to friends. That Billie would be repainted as the harpy mother, the unbearable millstone around her daughter’s neck, and she would lose her grip on Olive entirely. Maybe she’d get her daughter back at some point in Olive’s twenties. Maybe she’d never get her back at all.

  It didn’t seem fair: that you could have love, and then that love could fizzle, curdle, ossify into something less wonderful than what it once was. And then you were stuck, because ultimately, love is a kind of trap. Once you find it, you can’t deviate from that commitment without everyone getting hurt. You can’t just leave. Instead, need wins out over freedom; and everyone stands around feeling wounded and bitter, letting inertia take over.

  She knew this because she did try to leave once, a few years back, when the claustrophobia and dissatisfaction first started creeping in. There had been a fight with Olive and Jonathan—the two of them ganging up on her for some idiotic reason, something about a sleepover with Natalie—and she found herself packing a bag, not quite sure where she was going but knowing she couldn’t spend one more moment there. She scribbled an apologetic note—I love you, I’m sorry, don’t worry about me—and then drove right past the Berkeley Bowl, past the Trader Joe’s down the road, straight down University, and east onto Highway 80. By the following morning, she’d made it all the way to Utah, with no intention of coming back.

  But then, about the time she saw the Wasatch Range in the distance, she started imagining Olive’s and Jonathan’s faces when they realized that she’d left them. Olive, crying until she retched, the way she used to as a baby. Jonathan, drowning in self-blame. Billie couldn’t bear to be the cause of that pain. It began to dawn on her that they would eventually come to hate her, that everyone would hate her: She would forever be the Bad Mother, the mom who abandoned her family.

  So she pulled off the road a half hour outside Salt Lake City and reluctantly turned her car back west. By the time she rolled back into the driveway, she’d half convinced herself that the whole episode had never happened. That everything was just hunky-dory. She stepped back into the house and smiled at her beloved husband, went to give her darling daughter a kiss, warmed herself on the fire of their delighted relief. Then tried to pretend that she hadn’t just walked right back into a box of her own making.

  And yet here she is, four years later, opening the lid of the box again.

  The sun is directly overhead now, marking midday. Time to move. She stands up and tucks the snack wrapper into her backpack; tosses a tough piece of dried mango into the river below. It lands on the edge of a current and swirls in pointless circles before getting caught up in the rapids. It teeters perilously on the brink of the waterfall and then, just like that, it’s gone. So easily disappeared.

  She stands up and stretches, peering across the rapids to the other side. The woods there are denser than they are on this side of the river; they climb toward the adjacent summit in a beckoning way. She shades her eyes and looks up: The next mountaintop over must have an incredible view of Lake Tahoe. There is no path that she can see, just a slight opening in the trees through which a deer or a slender woman would fit. On her map, the trail dead-ends right at the waterfall, but Billie can see that there’s much of interest on the other side. Probably no one has hiked through there in years, everyone always so sensibly sticking to the marked routes.

  She shoulders her backpack and reties the laces of her boots nice and tight. Then she jumps from the boulder where she’s been sitting and lands, heavily, on a flat rock right on the edge of the water. There’s a dead log lodged in the rapids a few feet ahead, and she coils herself up like a spring and jumps again, landing with a jolt that she can feel in her knees. The log sinks a bit in the water but holds under her weight. The backpack bites into her hips, and she tightens the straps to keep it square against her body. She can’t afford to lose her balance.

  She leapfrogs like this most of the way across the river, from rock to rock, the raging water sloshing across the top of her boots until her socks grow sodden and clammy around her toes. She feels almost as graceful as she was when she was twenty years old and scaling old-growth redwoods with her bare hands. I still got it, she thinks.

  And then, when she’s still too far out from the other bank of
the river, she gets stuck. The next cluster of boulders is at least five feet away, a daunting distance, with a lacy crust of ice across the top. She turns in a circle, assessing her options, but there’s no other way across. Downstream, the waterfall is so loud that it’s drowning out the buzz of the adrenaline in her head.

  She gathers herself and leaps.

  Her left foot misses the rock entirely, plunging her left leg into the freezing water right up to her thigh. The other foot hits the patch of ice and slides sideways, fruitlessly scrambling to gain purchase with the worn treads of her boots. She flings herself forward in the hope that the weight of the backpack will pin her in place against the boulder. Her hands scrabble at the granite, seeking a handhold, the skin tearing off her fingertips. The rapids greedily suck at her, doing their best to pry her loose. Christ.

  And then, just as she’s starting to panic that she’s going to get pulled into the water and tumbled over the falls, her right boot lodges in a fissure in the rock. Panting, she carefully bellies upward until she’s above the waterline again. She reaches down and rinses her bleeding hand in the river and then sticks a finger in her mouth. The taste puckers her tongue: sweat and blood and mud.

  The rest of the way across is simple, and in just minutes she’s on the other side. She turns to look back at her route across the river—from over here, it looks like an impossible crossing—and then she walks into the woods.

  The forest is thick and dark and loud with buzzing insects. She walks just inside the trees, parallel to the water’s edge, knocking away dead brush to make a path for herself. After a few minutes, she emerges onto a sunny overhang, overlooking the waterfall but hidden by the trees from the trail on the other side. She peels off her boots and cargo pants and lays them out to dry.