The Year of Disappearances (17 page)

My mother rented a motel room near the state police headquarters; she told the Hillhouse administrators that I needed time to recover from the shock of Autumn’s death. Every day she made sure that I ate and drank tonic, slept (she gave me sleeping pills), and took a walk. The two of us walked around the small town near campus for half an hour every day. No one knew who we were, and no one bothered us. At night my mother read to me, and as soon as she stopped, I couldn’t remember what she read. When she thought I was asleep, she’d telephone someone and talk in a voice so low I couldn’t hear her. Curiously, the murmur of her voice in the dark soothed me more than any lullaby or story could have.

When the week was over, I began to think and feel again, in small spurts. Material that I couldn’t process when it occurred now began to present itself in the form of questions.

“What about Autumn’s funeral?” I asked Mãe as we walked through town. “Was there a memorial service?”

“She was buried two days ago.” Mãe kept one hand on my arm, as if to steer me. “And if there’s a memorial service, you shouldn’t think of attending.”

“Why not?”

She sighed, and again I realized how tired she looked. “Ariella, you won’t want to come to Sassa for a while. The rumors and accusations are going to be even worse this time.”

We walked on. I noticed leaf buds on a tree. In some other world, spring was on its way.

Another question surfaced: “Mãe, what were you doing in Georgia when Burton called?”

“I was taking care of family.” She looked around us, as if someone might be listening. “It wasn’t a good idea for me to talk to you about it, while the police interviews were going on. But tomorrow, you and I are going away for a week.”

She wouldn’t tell me more than that.

We drove to campus the next day so that I could pack fresh clothes and more tonic. Part of me was still in zombie mode, taking in sensory data without experiencing it, but bursts of clarity came more often than the day before. “I’m missing so many classes,” I said.

“Spring break begins next week,” Mãe said. “Later you can make up what you missed. That is, if you’re sure you want to come back here.”

I couldn’t imagine what else I might do.

“You needn’t decide now,” she said.

The Hillhouse parking lots and grounds were quiet. It seemed that many students had already left for spring break. Our dorm room looked as if no one was living there. The beds were neatly made, the floor swept, desks cleared. I wondered if Autumn had died in this room, or if it had happened later, in the swamp.

I glanced at the spot on the table where my lithophane lamp had been.

“I’m sorry about your lamp,” Mãe said.

I shook my head. “It was only a thing.” But it had been much more than that, and we both knew it. The lamp had soothed me when I awoke at night, a small child alone.

“We can try to find another one.” Her voice, like her face, was tired, disheartened. “I bought the original when I was pregnant with you.”

She rarely talked to me about that time, which I’d heard had been painful for her. She’d been ill and unhappy, unsure if having a child was the right thing to do.

I was trying to think of something to say when I saw a small vase of half-dead wildflowers on my desk. Next to it lay a note: “Ari, We miss you.” It took me a minute to be sure of the signature. Walker’s handwriting was nearly illegible.

I wondered if I’d see him again.

Sitting in the truck next to my mother, I let myself surrender to uncertainty. The spring air was cool and the long empty stretches of low country looked familiar: skinny pine trees, scrubby flats, swamp grass ranging from ash to pale green to emerald. We headed north, passing a prairie of grass divided by a river. Across the water, the land along the horizon looked blue.

I dozed, and when I awoke we were passing a trailer park called Druid Oaks, whose homes were festooned with two-dimensional plywood nutcrackers and reindeer, even though Christmas was months behind us. A few miles farther down the road, tidy-looking houses made of brick sat squarely on mowed lots, facing the road. Those houses held no secrets.

“Are we near Savannah?” I asked.

Mãe nodded.

I’d been in Savannah a year ago, when I was trying to find my mother.

“Is that where we’re going?”

“We’re passing through,” she said. “How are you feeling, Ariella?”

“All right,” I said. My appetite was better now. I could taste the food I ate. Sleeping was still broken. My mind kept wanting to revisit the scene in the swamp, at the same time afraid to go there.

“She was a friend,” I found myself saying. “Not a very close friend, but someone I cared about. She was a cool person, in her way—stubborn and brave. She didn’t deserve to end up like that.”

“No one does.” Now both of us were picturing Autumn, reduced to a floating mass of dark clothes and hair discarded in shallow water.

“It will be easier for you, over time.” My mother’s profile cut a stern shape into the moving landscape. “I hope that you’re ready to hear what I need to say next. We’re going to see your father.”

As we drove on, Mãe told me we were headed for a house she had rented on Tybee Island, off the Georgia coast. “It was the safest place I could think of,” she said. “Given the circumstances.”

After my father left our house in December—”and he was furious, Ariella, furious about what happened to you and furious to see Burton again”—he’d rented a car and begun to search for the man in the Chevy van.

“He told me all this only a week ago,” she said. “He’d wanted to be in touch sooner, but he didn’t dare risk it. We think the police may be monitoring our calls.”

Mãe told the story with digressions and editorial comments, which I’m trying not to repeat here in their entirety. The circumstances were these: two days after he left us, my father had found the man in the Chevy sitting outside our front gate again. The van took off when my father’s car approached. My father followed it to the local high school. Eventually, the man persuaded a teenage girl to get into the van. My father followed the van as it traveled across Florida from west to east, ending up at a suburban house in Daytona Beach.

“Close to fifty teenagers were staying at the house,” Mãe said. “Raphael watched some being delivered and others picked up. He wanted to follow the pickup vans, to find out where the kids were being taken, but he was running low on serum. So he called me.”

By now we were on the outskirts of Savannah, passing strip malls and car lots. I kept an eye out for beige vans. A school bus in the lane ahead of us stopped, and I watched children climb onto the bus. Were any of their lives as complicated as mine? Quite possibly.

“I thought you said our phones might be tapped.”

“Raphael disguised his voice.” And then my mother smiled, a small wry smile that seemed out of place. “He imitated my sister. He did that in the old days, after she’d done something annoying, and it made her almost bearable.”

Then she looked serious again. “So I drove to a motel near Daytona with the serum. He looked tired, but after he took the medicine he seemed utterly exhausted. And after I’d returned his rental car, I came back and found him barely conscious.” She stopped the truck at a red light and turned to face me. “Ariella, your father is very ill. Can you deal with that?”

I nodded. What else could I do?

We drove through Savannah, past houses ornate as wedding cakes along Victory Drive, and out onto the Islands Parkway. Still no beige vans. My mother said she’d barely had time to get my father settled into the rental house when Dashay called her, telling her that Burton wanted to interview me.

“We arranged for Dashay to drive up and look after Raphael,” she said. “And I came down to meet you.” Mãe said that Dashay had found a doctor in Savannah who was one of us. The doctor had examined my father and was running tests.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“We don’t know yet,” Mãe said.

Now we were driving on a two-lane road with marshlands and water on either side. I rolled down the window to smell the salt in the breeze. The main town of Tybee Island was touristy, lined with lurid signs and shabby souvenir shops. My mother said it had been different when she summered there as a child. She and my father first met on the beach when they were children. “All of that seems to have happened a million years ago,” she said now.

She turned the car into a small street that dead-ended at the beach and parked the truck. After we got out, she rested her hands on my shoulders. “Remember what I told you,” she said. “He doesn’t look the way you remember him.”

That’s when I began to truly be afraid.

Mãe led me down a gravel path to a house on stilts that faced the beach. I heard the low hiss of the ocean not far away. We climbed a somewhat rickety set of steps that led to a dark green door.

Dashay opened the door, talking into a cell phone—a surprise, since she and my mother had never used one, in my experience. “Okay,” she said. “I get it. Thank you, Dr. Cho. See you soon.” She clicked off the phone and hugged each of us as we came into the house.

I didn’t notice anything in the room, except the absence of my father. “Where is he?”

“He’s in bed.” Dashay gestured to the left. “Wait,” she said, but I was already moving.

The windows of the room were open, and the noise of the ocean was louder now. A figure lay beneath a quilt on the double bed, dark hair against a pillow, face turned toward the wall. Next to the bed, an IV pole held two bags, one of clear fluid, one of red. The red one had a tube attached to it that ran under the quilt.

“Father?” I said.

Behind me, Dashay said, “Did you tell her?” and Mãe said, “Yes.”

“Father?” I walked closer. He didn’t move. I bent over him to see his face, and when I saw it, a wave of vertigo hit me. Someone grabbed me, pulled me backward.

His eyes were half-open, but he didn’t seem to see me. His face looked shrunken, shriveled, the skin tight across the bones. He reminded me of Old Joe, lying stiff and still, getting ready to die.

When Dr. Cho arrived that afternoon, I’d recovered enough to frame a dozen questions. What caused my father’s condition? What were his chances of survival? I practiced the questions on my mother and Dashay, who didn’t have any answers.

Dr. Cho was a tiny woman with long black hair held back by a clip and a serene, oval face. She didn’t mince words. “Severe hemolytic anemia,” she said. “His red blood cells are breaking down faster than his body can replace them. There’s a growing risk of heart failure.”

I said, “Is he going to die?”

“He needs a massive transfusion.” Her voice was crisp. “The sooner we begin, the better his chances.”

Dr. Cho had brought plastic bags of blood with her; as she lifted them out of a portable cooler, they glowed in the afternoon sunlight, their color between maroon and burgundy. She put them in the refrigerator, except for one that she carried into the bedroom.

Mãe, Dashay, and I offered to help, but she said that would come later. We sat at the kitchen table while she worked. There wasn’t a sound in the place except for the ocean.

Suddenly I said, “Is he in pain?”

Mãe and Dashay looked at each other. Dashay said, “We don’t know. He stopped talking days ago, and his thoughts aren’t making much sense.”

We sat silently at the table. Dr. Cho came in after an hour or so and switched on the overhead light. “What, is this a funeral?” she said. “Go take a walk on the beach.”

“How is he?” Mãe’s voice sounded scratchy.

“He’s very sick. You know that. His heart rate isn’t regular, and I’m going to put him on a respirator tomorrow if his breathing doesn’t improve. Now get outside, look at the moon. Then we need to eat some dinner, please.” For a small person, her voice carried enormous authority.

We shuffled out of the room, down the steps, and along the path to a ramp that led to the beach. The darkness and the sounds of the ocean swelled around us. The moon was full that night, but we couldn’t see it because of cloud cover, and I was glad. I let my face lose its stoic expression, and I felt it contort. Grief felt close to rage, that night, and I didn’t want the others to see what I felt.

He can’t die,
I thought.
He’s a vampire. Vampires don’t die.

That night, I wanted all the myths to be true. And for the first time in my life, I wanted to pray.

The song of my cell phone sounded so inappropriate. I sensed Mãe and Dashay flinch at the sound of
Swan Lake.

The last voice I expected to hear was Walker’s. He said he was at home in North Carolina. Then he asked where I was, and I told him. I told him my father was sick, and he said he was sorry. He asked if he could come to help, and when I told him no, he sounded disappointed.

“After break, I’m going to take you on a picnic,” he said.

I couldn’t imagine it. “That sounds nice,” I said.

“We’ll eat strawberries, and I’ll show you the new tricks I’ve learned,” he said. “When are you coming back?”

“I’m not sure yet.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I might not be coming back at all.