Watch Me Disappear

by Janelle Brown

That grief isn’t something you can walk away from after a finite amount of time, but is something that washes you along, tumbling you in and out with the tides?)

“No,” she says, thinking of the pill bottle in her room at home. Of how she tipped the Depakote pills into the toilet when she got home from Sharon Parkins’s house; of the pretty way they swirled on their way down. She picked through the old medicine bottles in the cabinet until she found something that looked vaguely like the Depakote—a blister pack of expired allergy pills—and refilled the bottle with those. Just in case anyone bothers to watch her. Like Ms. Gillespie. Or her dad. She’s feeling more clearheaded already; that hopeless dulled-pencil feeling of the past few days was gone when she woke up this morning. She can feel herself vibrating around the edges again, as if her molecules are in motion, ready to tune in to whatever the world is sending her way today. Her mother is just out of sight; Olive can sense her again, creeping back in closer, almost in view.

“How can you be wrong about someone for so long?” Jonathan marveled. They were sitting on the back sunporch, drinking manhattans, watching night set over the garden. At this, Billie set her drink down on the arm of her chair and squinted at him with an expression of amused disbelief. “Easy. You can be wrong if they want you to be wrong. Look. All people are unknowable, no matter how close you may think you are. Of the millions of thoughts we all think every day, of the millions of experiences we have, how many do we allow other people to know about? A handful? And no one willingly shares their worst, do they? The flaws you see, those are like the very tip of an iceberg. So we’re all just poking around on the surface, trying to figure out the people we love with a kind of, I guess, naïve idealism.”

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.

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.