Watch Me Disappear Page 4

  “I like gems of all sizes,” Jonathan calls back. “I’ll take semiprecious stones, too, if that’s on offer.”

  “She means salad, Dad,” Olive says under her breath. “It’s like miniature romaine.”

  “I know,” he says. “Ha ha?”

  But Harmony has thrown her head back and is laughing as if this is the funniest joke she’s ever heard. His wife’s old friend is one of those women who embody the word abundance: She is lush and pink and always slightly damp from exertion, like a milkmaid in a Vermeer painting. Her blond hair is pinned up in messy braids that frame her face; her Dansko chef’s clogs clatter on the asphalt as she ferries groceries across the street to them.

  She gives Jonathan a moist kiss on his cheek and envelops Olive in an embrace, but Olive quickly wriggles free and races up the path and into the house. Harmony turns back to Jonathan with raised eyebrows, and he shrugs.

  “Sorry,” he says. “She’s in a little bit of a mood.”

  “Well, she’s allowed to be. It’s the anniversary coming up soon, right?” He nods as Harmony leans toward him, her wide blue eyes narrowing. “And you? How are you holding up?”

  “You know. Sometimes it feels like the fog that’s surrounded Olive and me is finally lifting; like maybe we’re halfway back to normalcy. And then I’ll sit down to work on the book, and the next thing you know, I’m at the bottom of a bottle of bourbon with snot pouring down my face.” He stops, the words snagging in his throat.

  Harmony’s face twitches with emotion, her eyes going moist, but she says nothing. He’s learned to appreciate this about her: the way she refuses to overshadow his sadness with her own. “There’s a meditation for mindful grief that I find helpful, if you’d like me to share it with you. And you know I’m just a phone call away if you need to talk.”

  “I already have you on speed dial.” As nearly everyone else has fallen away this year—the well-meaning acquaintances losing interest, the friends abruptly busy with their own minor life dramas—Harmony is one of the few who’s stuck around. Billie’s death was the first time Jonathan really felt the absence of extended family. His own parents are infirm and halfway across the country, and Billie’s were estranged long ago; and the only sibling either of them could claim—Jonathan’s sister, Jenny—died decades earlier. Instead, Harmony stepped in and took over the caretaking that a parent or sister otherwise might, from monitoring their house and fending off the TV cameras when Billie first went missing up in the mountains, to planning the memorial when Jonathan proved emotionally incapable.

  He’s indebted to her for this, and for her uncanny ability to show up at the exact moment when he seems to need it the most, with a coffee or a farmers’ market box. With Harmony, he can be himself, because she gets it: She lost Billie, too. If he’s driven her crazy with his endless talking about Billie—tirelessly circling his grief, his worries about Olive, this fresh void in his life feeling more like a wall around which he has to learn to navigate—she’s never once shown it.

  “Dinner Monday?” she asks. “I’ll cook for you guys.”

  “Amazing,” he says, just as his phone starts ringing in the pocket of his jeans. He pulls it out and reads the display: JEAN BURSCH. “Sorry, I have to take this. My lawyer.”

  Harmony’s eyebrows shoot upward. “Good luck,” she whispers. He watches her saunter back across the street toward the car, her hips swaying as she walks. He turns away, suddenly uncomfortable.

  When he answers his phone, Jean’s voice is coated with a shiny shell of optimism.

  “Good news! We’ve made progress! Our court date is confirmed for November first. Conceivably we could have all this wrapped up by the holidays.”

  Jonathan walks slowly toward the house, taking this in. Sodden worms are expiring on the front path, refugees from the earlier downpour. The plane trees sway as a gust of wind passes through, releasing a fine spray of rainwater across the top of his jacket.

  “November first,” he repeats. He watches a mother walking by pushing a stroller, a baby’s watery face peering anxiously out from beneath a plastic rain cover. “I can’t believe this process has taken a whole year.”

  “We’re lucky. It could have dragged on much, much longer. The hoops you have to jump through for missing-presumed-dead cases are not your usual hoops.”

  Missing, presumed dead. This phrase drives him insane, the way it insists on inserting doubt where there is none. The facts are simple: Billie went backpacking by herself along the Pacific Crest Trail in Desolation Wilderness. She never came back down the mountain. No one was sure exactly what had happened, but the official verdict was that Billie had probably gone off-trail (this would have been so very Billie of her) and fallen into a ravine, hurt herself, and couldn’t hike out. Or maybe she was attacked by a wild animal, or just got lost and died of hunger and thirst.

  Even now, a year later, Jonathan is plagued by the question of how long it had taken his wife to die. What if she had lain there for days, somewhere under the ponderosa pines, hurt and helpless, hearing the search helicopters overhead but incapable of summoning them? He lies awake at night, imagining the horror of it all: Her waning hope that someone might find her, wherever she was, before it was too late. The dawning awareness that death was approaching as she measured out drops of water and the last crumbs of her granola bars. Then nothing but her fading breath and the scuttling of pikas and yellow-bellied marmots across the granite slopes. It’s unbearable to think about. Instead, he prays that death was instantaneous: that she fell, broke her neck, and didn’t have to suffer such a lonely ending.

  For the first day or two after Billie failed to return from her hike, Jonathan had clung to the hope that she’d just decided to take a little more time to herself. Everything considered, it wasn’t entirely out of the question. There had always been that loner streak in her; she could be haphazard, unpredictable. He could still remember the time, years earlier, when she’d vanished for a weekend with no explanation, leaving Jonathan trying to explain to Olive that Mommy was tired, she’d gone on a vacation by herself. “I just needed some space to breathe,” Billie had said when she came back, as if that explained everything; and he’d pointed out patiently that the space was fine, but the lack of communication was not. Maybe she’d forgotten that lesson.

  But the days passed, long past the point when she would have run out of food and water. Meanwhile, Billie’s Subaru remained parked at the trailhead, her credit cards lay dormant, the wireless company couldn’t trace any phone activity. Wall-to-wall local TV and online news coverage failed to turn up anyone who’d seen her, other than a pair of backpackers who’d briefly chatted with her on the trail. After a week, a search-and-rescue volunteer found Billie’s shattered cellphone at the bottom of a steep cascade of barren rock near Pyramid Peak, fourteen miles off the Pacific Crest Trail. Even then, Jonathan believed that she might be alive nearby, surviving on nuts and berries.

  But she wasn’t. The authorities searched for nine days before giving up: nine days of sitting with Olive in a freezing, featureless room in the ranger headquarters, Jonathan knowing that Billie had been missing far too long but still grasping at some tiny speck of hope. Sleeping under scratchy wool blankets across three folding chairs; drinking coffee with powdered creamer out of Styrofoam cups; his arm going numb from where he kept it clenched around Olive’s shoulders. On the last night, it snowed. The next morning, the head ranger came in and offered Olive a box of doughnuts as if sugar might cushion the blow, and Jonathan got to watch his daughter’s face collapse inward as this weather-battered man uttered the words We’re calling off the search. The understanding hit him like a fist in the gut a half second later, choking him wordless.

  For a month or two, Jonathan continued to clutch at other straws, including the awful possibility that Billie could have been abducted. But that theory was put to rest when her hiking boot was found half submerged in a riverbed in mid-December, and the authorities explained to him that there was no plau
sible way she could have been dragged, shoeless, from so deep in the wilderness without anyone noticing. (More likely, they said, she had taken off her boot because of an injury, and it had been washed downstream in the current.) The other option—that she was murdered somewhere out there—was too horrible to even contemplate.

  In the meantime, there was no body to cling to, nothing to bury or to burn or to cry over. Maybe that’s why Jonathan writes about Billie now, and why he continues to hang on to the objects she left behind, things that prove she once existed. The drawer stuffed with jogging bras that still smell faintly of her deodorant. The running shoes on the front porch, muddy soles fissured and dry. The Tana French mystery by her side of the bed, with a bookmark placed halfway through as if Billie might have the opportunity to find out what happens in the end. Probably he should sort through all of his wife’s stuff, but he can’t quite bear to do it.

  Billie’s body: Its absence has left him with an emotional, legal, and financial mess to unravel, the court having refused to issue a death certificate until Billie’s death is “verified” by “diligent search or inquiry.” Jonathan wouldn’t have predicted that a death certificate would be that important, but it is. All year long, he’s felt like he’s existed in a state of limbo, waiting for some mysterious Powers That Be to acknowledge the validity of his grief. Not that a death certificate will make Billie any more or less gone than she already is, but he can’t shake his hope that this one piece of paper might give him some sense of conclusiveness that has been eluding him.

  And then there’s the vexing fact that the lack of a death certificate also means no probate, which has led to a total tax mess and (most distressingly) prevented a life insurance payout—the latter being a rather substantial quarter-million-dollar sum that would, let’s be honest, really help right about now. He is running, worryingly, on fumes. Although his agent ultimately sold Where the Mountain Meets the Sky: My Life with Billie Flanagan for an advance that seemed rather astonishing—more than his annual salary, even after eighteen years at Decode—what he didn’t anticipate was that this money would be trickling out in depressingly small quantities over the course of three years. The initial payment he received last spring vanished long before Labor Day.

  Making matters even worse, he discovered not long after Billie’s memorial that their finances were in a shockingly bad state. Billie had served as the family accountant, and somehow she had failed to alert him that they were grazing the bottom of their savings account. Probably this shouldn’t have come as a surprise—Bay Area life had grown radically more expensive, while their own incomes had not risen commensurately. Still. For the last few months, he’s been slowly and painfully chipping away at his 401(k) just to cover his mortgage and health insurance premiums; anything deemed not quite as urgent (say, tuition bills) has slipped to the wayside.

  But here they are, finally, close to a resolution. All those months of meetings and depositions and affidavits are ending in this, a court hearing in which they will once and for all “prove” that Billie is dead, and receive a death certificate. Prove. He jokes about it with his friend Marcus sometimes—“I’m trapped in a Kafka novel”—but in his lowest moments, the cruelty of it all makes him want to scream. Such a phenomenal pointless suck of time and money and emotional energy at the exact moment when you have zero to spare.

  “So, just one last hoop we need to jump through before the court date,” Jean is saying on the other end of the line. “We need to put notices in several national newspapers, notifying Billie that we’re looking for her.”

  He kicks at a slick of dead leaves on the porch, pushing them into a soggy pile to attend to later. “Let me make sure I’m understanding this correctly. We’re supposed to put messages in a newspaper for a dead woman to read?”

  “Try not to think about it too much,” Jean says.

  He laughs despite himself. “Even if Billie were alive, she wouldn’t be reading classified ads. A newspaper classified? Do they even still exist? Has no one in the court system heard of Craigslist?”

  “You can look it up, if you like.” Her voice is apologetic. “Code 12406(b)(1). Diligent search and inquiry. It specifically says newspapers. Anyway, in the ad, you’ll want to ask if anyone knows about her whereabouts. Something along the lines of”—she pauses—“ ‘If you have any information about the whereabouts of Sybilla “Billie” Flanagan’—what was her maiden name again?”

  “Thrace. But she never used it. She was estranged from her parents, hadn’t spoken to them since high school.”

  “That’s right. Well, we’ll put the name in there anyway, just to cover our bases. And then ‘please contact’ with the phone number of the police. You know what? I’ll write it up for you so you don’t have to deal with it at all.”

  Jonathan looks up and realizes that a parking enforcement officer has pulled up behind his Prius and is issuing a ticket: He forgot that it was street sweeping day on this side of the street. He gestures frantically, but the attendant ignores him as he sticks the ticket under the windshield wiper and drives off. That’s fifty dollars that he can’t really spare. On top of the five hundred dollars an hour that this conversation is costing him, not to mention the bill he’s going to get for the time it will take Jean to place those ads.

  “You still there?” Jean asks.

  “Yeah,” he says. “You know what? I can call in those classifieds myself. Just tell me what I need to do.”

  —

  Inside the house, it’s quiet and gloomy. Their house is—like most on the block—a shingled Berkeley Craftsman, splintery and dark, jammed with original period detail but permanently drafty. It’s been raining all week, the heating system working overtime, and the close air smells of wet towels and scorched dust. Jonathan switches on a lamp, so that the thin glow of its LED bulb illuminates the entry and living room. Catsby, Olive’s latest stray—a dyspeptic calico with one gnawed-off ear—comes running, sees that it’s Jonathan, and turns away, uninterested.

  There are heaps of discarded clothes by the front door; tumbleweeds of cat hair drifting along the hall; a curdled whiff from the recycling that needs to be taken out. Billie wasn’t a meticulous housekeeper—she let things go a little too long; surfaces would be neat and clean, but move anything aside and you’d see a film of dust, dirty laundry on the floor of the closet—but now that Jonathan is in charge, things have truly gone downhill. How did his wife manage to keep on top of the endless Sisyphean nature of homemaking? He marvels at how invisible she used to make it look, how uncomplaining she was. It’s not that he never did a load of laundry or washed the dishes or swept the floor; he contributed the best he could. But he never grasped the scope of all the things that magically appeared—a fridge full of food, vacation itineraries, doctor’s appointments, new upholstery on the couch, regulation uniforms for Olive—until he was responsible for all of it himself.

  He maneuvers through the house, picking up the most obviously offending messes, stopping, as he often does, to glance at the easel that sits in the prime spot on the back sunporch. It has Billie’s last unfinished painting on it: a landscape of some ocean vista, the horizon sketched in pencil, her palette of blue paints dried to a crust. The stool before it remains positioned just so to catch the last lingering rays of the sun. Sometimes, when Jonathan is not at all sober, he’ll stumble out to stare at the painting and just marvel at the pitiful symbolism of it all.

  He heads to the kitchen and deposits the bags of salad on the counter, then starts to dig in the refrigerator in search of something to go with it. He retrieves a slightly limp zucchini from the crisper and examines it, putting a pot of water on to boil.

  Olive materializes in the kitchen behind him, drifting toward a bowl of overripe bananas with a frown. “You really need to go grocery shopping, Dad,” she says. “There’s nothing to eat.”

  “There’s Little Gem salad,” he says. “Rather a lot of it.”

  “We’re out of toilet paper, too. Unless you inte
nded that as an environmental-consciousness measure? In which case, yay, but ew.” She grabs a banana and heads for the door.

  He tries to think of something to say that might stop her departure. “I just had an update from the lawyer,” he blurts.

  She stops and turns around, the half-peeled banana hanging limply from her fist. “Sorry, what?”

  “The lawyer,” he says. “She says we finally have a court date. Early November.”

  A curious expression crosses Olive’s face, her brow furrowing as she takes this in. “After that,” Olive says slowly, “Mom is officially dead? But legally speaking, as of now she’s not dead yet?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “I get it.”

  He stops chopping the zucchini to look at Olive. “Does that upset you? Should we talk about this some more?”

  Olive leans on the kitchen counter, pushing aside a pile of mail, mostly athletic catalogs that haven’t yet noticed that Billie no longer needs ultralight hoodies and dry-weave leggings and Gore-Tex-lined hiking pants. With one hand, Olive gingerly traces the lump on her forehead. “Dad. Remember when you once told me about the importance of journalists keeping an open mind? Of—objectivity?”

  “No, I don’t, but yes, that’s true.” He notices a strange smile flickering around the corners of his daughter’s mouth, and an ominous premonition spiders up the back of his neck. Something is going on. “OK. Lay it on me.”

  “I don’t think Mom’s dead,” Olive blurts. And then, reading the confusion and dismay on Jonathan’s face, she continues in a rush, “Just listen to me. I know this is going to sound crazy, but I saw her.”

  For a split second, something in Jonathan’s chest seizes. Is it possible? Then he reaches across the kitchen and gently tugs at Olive’s hand, holding it in his own. It lies in his palm, heartbreakingly small and yielding. “Olive. I see her all the time, too. Any time I pass someone on the street with hair like hers, I do a double take. Women who walk like her, or are wearing hiking gear, or have her profile. Every single time, there’s a second when I’m convinced that it’s really her. But it never is.”