Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance

by Alison Espach

“Billy is so dumb,” you said to me, but you smiled as you said it, as if it were the best thing a boy could be.

During all of our nightly conversations, it had never occurred to me that I might actually speak to Billy one day. I had loved Billy the way I loved Hawaii or Paris, two places we talked about visiting at night, but knew we’d never see because Dad claimed he was too tall to fit in an airplane for that long. So we put up posters of Paris in our room and talked about the kind of croissants we would eat at the base of the Eiffel Tower and that felt like enough.

The only thing Billy cared about in middle school was basketball. He even slept with his basketball some nights, you told me once. At a certain point, I stopped wondering how you knew things about Billy and just processed what you were telling me as fact.

“But what if I don’t want to be a nun?” I asked you later that night. “Why would you have to be a nun?” you asked. Nuns didn’t get a choice; that’s what Valerie Mitt said at CCD class. Her aunt didn’t have a choice. Her aunt was just sitting on some park bench, reading her book, minding her business, when God spoke to her. Called her to worship the Lord. And so she became a nun. For years after Grandma’s comment, I worried about God finding me like that, too. Whenever we were out in public, walking to the car or through the mall, I made sure to stay three steps behind you, so God would choose you first.

“Your father works very hard,” Mom said. “He deserves air-conditioning.” “What does he even do?” I asked. I never understood this. Dad’s job was so confusing, even though you had explained it a million times. “He’s a safety consultant,” you said. “He keeps people safe.”

“I refuse to ask my own daughter to button her own pants. That’s supposed to be a given. That’s supposed to be something your child just does.” By then, she didn’t even sound like she was talking to us anymore. She sounded as if she was talking to the company who manufactured us.

I had been very busy trying to unwrap my Jolly Rancher—notoriously difficult. Sometimes the plastic melted into the candy or the candy melted into the plastic. I couldn’t tell, which Mom said was a reason I should not be eating it—you shouldn’t be eating something that cannot be distinguished from plastic.

“How can you be so smart and not know what a slut is?” you asked. “It wasn’t on any of my vocab tests.” This was a joke, but you didn’t laugh.

It always felt like my fault when you were bored, for some reason.

You didn’t understand why it was cool for some girls to be stupid and embarrassing for other girls to be stupid.

But I knew then that anybody who chose to be alone had no idea what it really meant to be alone.

he stopped on a western. I don’t remember which one, but I remember it was a western because the screen was very yellow and everything always looked very yellow in a western, as if the world had been left outside for too long and gone bad.

“And I was like, I don’t really have any problems,” I said. “I mean, something terrible happened. But it didn’t happen to me. It happened to my sister. And I don’t have problems. Or well, everyone has problems. And so I don’t know what there is to talk about right now really. And Lydia was like, Well, here, in this space, you don’t need to talk.” “Isn’t that the whole point though?” Billy asked. “That you have to talk?” “That’s what I said.” “What’d Lydia say?” Billy asked. “When you are ready, Sally, you can talk.” It was forty-eight minutes later when I felt ready. “I was like, goodbye, Lydia. Have a great day.”

“I don’t get the point of postcards,” you said to me, throwing Pricilla’s cards into the trash. “They basically exist just to be like, Ha ha! I am in Europe and you are not.”

“Being safe,” he explained to me, “requires eliminating all the potential for risk.” Being safe requires keeping your eye always on task; it requires you to think ahead and be organized and pay attention to where all of your tools are, because when you are a thousand feet in the air on a cell phone tower and your hammer is falling to the ground, well, that’s no good. People die because of that, he said. Dad taught men how to see the bad things before they happened: To look at a table and see the four sharp corners that any small child could run into. To look out at the deck and see the nail sticking out of the wood and the black ice on the driveway before it formed. Dad could see all of this, and you’d think this kind of thing would make a person a hero, but it didn’t.

When nothing bad happened, nobody even noticed. When nothing bad happened, it was just an ordinary day. Sometimes, when Dad was yelling his loudest at me, this was what he seemed to be saying: Do you people know how many ordinary days I’ve provided for you?

“Make out with whom?” I asked. Valerie laughed. “Make out with whom,” she repeated. “Only you would say that, Sally.” “It’s how you say it,” I said. “Everybody should say it like that.”

It’s no big deal, Mrs. Mitt said, we’re happy to drop you off, but it seemed weirdly important to Valerie that no one’s parents dropped us off, important that we were not caught sliding out the dark minivan of our mother’s love. We were teenagers now, and we preferred, when given the opportunity, to suffer.

We sprinted away before paying, and exploded into one giant laugh, because that was the only way we knew how to laugh.

“Come on,” Priscilla said, when she found me. “We’re meeting some boys in the field.” Notice how I didn’t even ask, “What boys?” I just went. Because that was how you became a Girl Who Meets Boys in the Field.

Wendy and Mom were both extremely depressed, and if there was anything that depression gave you, I learned, it was the freedom of not giving a shit.

But I knew enough by then to know that it was unfair to use a woman’s past self against her.

I didn’t like hearing myself through Dad. It was only when Dad ordered Mom to stop crying that I understood we were bullies. We ordered her to be happy as if we knew what it meant to be happy. As if a person was not happy because they simply forgot to write it on their to-do list.

I was thinking that there was nothing better in this world than to discover someone who was weird in exactly the same way I was weird. To be weird and then loved for it.

All we can ever know is that we know nothing,” the therapist says. “Do you know who said that?” Billy? A long time ago, Billy once said that. “Socrates,” she says. “Socrates said that.” My therapist is always quoting important people of antiquity during our session, people like Ovid and Horace, and this doesn’t bother me as much as you might think. I like knowing that my problems exist within a large and respected tradition of problems. That ever since the beginning of civilization, humans have been very upset.

“Though who can even say what Socrates really said?” my therapist adds. “We basically just have to take Plato’s word for it.”

“You don’t have to pick up just because someone calls you again and again,” the therapist says. “You are freer than you think you are.”

My therapist is always giving me permission to stop loving Mom. That is why I go to her—she is always reminding me that Mom has damaged me, stunted my grieving process. She says things like, “Two people can’t throw up in the toilet at the same time,” and I can’t argue differently. It’s true. But then the therapist goes too far, says something like, “If another woman was calling you this much, what would you say to her?” and I get angry at the therapist for saying exactly the thing I am paying her to say.

We laughed a lot, but I don’t remember about what. I just remember laughing. And wasn’t that the most important thing? Wasn’t that all a person wanted to remember? I was in love by the time we docked. And that’s what I was like in Europe—in love with everybody by the time the night was over.

Ray has been at the company for five years now, and they have just started to make fun of Ray with ease, which Ray says is a good sign. It means they like him. Ray has enough confidence, enough success in life, enough hair, not to get offended very easily.

Their careers are all about pretending to know things they don’t really know that well. Knowledge is power, including knowledge a person pretends to have.

listening is very different from hearing. Hearing is something birds can do; it is passive and requires no feedback. But listening is active. It’s an effort required for actual communication. Communication is feedback.

“That’s what happens when parents die,” he says. “All of a sudden, you want an answer to every question you never thought to ask them.”

The solution was always the opposite of what we expected it to be.

He seems to hate us, simply because I want lobster. Fair enough. I have hated people for less.

Dad is curious. Nervous, too. He can’t help himself—he is a safety consultant to the very core, and when a man climbs up a ladder, he can’t help but imagine the fall.