The Year of Disappearances (4 page)

Dashay nodded. “Not spelled the same, but the same sound, and I think the same meaning. Though some folks will tell you this place was named for pepper plants!”

My mother sighed and left the table.

“Sasa is spiritual power,” Dashay said. “People have it. Animals have it. If you kill a dog, say, that animal’s sasa comes into you, puts a spell on you, takes its revenge.”

“You can see this sasa?”

“I can tell when it’s in someone, yes.”

My mother carried a plate of risotto to the table. She sat down without saying anything.

“What does it look like?” I had to know.

“On the right edge of his right iris, it looked like light, like a spot of light, flickering.” Dashay passed a bowl of salad to me. “That’s the place tied to the liver.”

Mãe was eating, but I sensed her skepticism. “Can everyone see them?” I asked.

“No. First you need to be a foy-eyed.” Dashay coughed. “That’s a Jamaican word.
Four-eyed
to you. It means you can see ghosts and spirits and such.”

“I’ve seen a ghost.” The words came out, and then I wished I could take them back. They conjured up the image of my best friend Kathleen, who had been murdered the year before.

We finished dinner without talking. Afterward Dashay came up to me while my mother put away the leftovers. “I can try to teach you, if you want,” she said. “Teach you how to see a sasa.”

“Maybe someday.” Curious as I was, I didn’t feel ready to see any more ghosts. The one I’d seen still haunted me.

“Still snooping?”

From the living room doorway the next morning, Mary Ellis Root glared at me. She was my father’s research assistant.

I dropped the letter I’d taken from a pile of my father’s mail. Like the others, it was addressed to Arthur Gordon Pym, the name he’d assumed when he moved to Florida. Raphael Montero had “died” in Saratoga Springs.

“What are
you
doing here?”

Root looked different. Same oily dark hair pulled back into a bun, same beetlelike body stuffed into a greasy-looking black dress. But the three long hairs that had sprung from a mole on her chin like misplaced antennae—they weren’t there anymore. I wondered, had she plucked them?

“He asked me to collect his mail.” Her voice was raspy as ever. “And just in time, I see.”

It was so like her to accuse me of snooping when
she
had walked unannounced into
our
house. But I didn’t try to defend myself. After all, I’d been caught in the act of prying. And Root and I had a history of mutual hostility. I’d always wondered why she resented me so much; I suspected that she hated anything and anyone that interrupted my father’s research.

Mãe walked in, carrying a coffee mug. “Mary Ellis,” she said. “What a surprise.”

Her voice suggested the surprise was a pleasant one, but I knew better. She didn’t like Root any more than I did.

“I came for his mail.” Root never used my father’s name.

“Of course,” Mãe said. “Would you care for some coffee? Or do you prefer pomegranate juice?”

We all were sitting at the kitchen table, sipping juice, pretending we liked each other, when Dashay walked in and said, “They’re all either dying or dead.”

Root didn’t ask who “they” were. I wondered if she could hear thoughts. Although I suspected that she was “one of us,” I didn’t know for sure. I’d never been able to tune in to her thoughts, and her personal habits were a mystery to me.

“They act as if they’ve been drugged,” Dashay said. “That is, the ones that haven’t disappeared. The ones who stay, they walk around in circles like they’re lost.” Dashay talked with her hands as well as her voice. I felt relieved that she’d taken the trouble to check out the bees, sorry that it had taken a crisis to reanimate her.

“What’s their disease?” Root’s voice sounded clipped and professional.

“It’s called Colony Collapse Disorder,” I said. “I checked it out on the Internet. Nobody knows the cause, but there are plenty of theories.”

“Most likely the cause is stress,” Root said, “brought on by something humans created. Pesticides, possibly.” For the first time, I had an inkling of what my father appreciated in her.

Mãe said, “I got a response from the Florida Department of Agriculture. They’ve had calls from all over the state. They haven’t come up with a definitive answer yet. But normally, if bees leave a hive, other insects and animals move in to eat the honey. Nobody’s touching this honey.”

“No bees, no cross-pollination.” Dashay’s hands flew outward. “Imagine what could happen to the food supply. What will people eat?”

“Just deserts.” Root’s eyes gleamed as she said it.

I turned to my mother, sent her the thought:
Root has made a
pun
?

Mãe didn’t respond. Her eyes moved restlessly around the table.

Root began to pile my father’s mail into a canvas bag she’d brought with her. She said she was staying with a friend near Sarasota. “Do
you
know when he’s coming back?” she asked my mother.

“Not yet.” Mãe shook her head, as if to clear it. “He’s looking for a new home.”

“I knew that much.” Root pushed back her chair. “What I need is a time frame. Our research can’t go on hold indefinitely.”

My mother said, “Neither can our lives.” The passion in her voice surprised us, perhaps herself most of all.

I
’ve never much cared for Sundays—dull brown days, according to my personal synesthesia. Synesthesia is common among vampires. For my mother, Sundays were gray. Dashay said her days of the week stopped having colors when she was thirteen, soon after she began seeing sasa.

I was staring at the survey chart that hung on the kitchen wall when Mãe came in and threw her arms around me.

“What’s this about?” My voice was muffled by her shirt.

“You looked glum,” she said.

“I think I’m homesick.” The words came out in capital letters, deep and dusky blue. They brought with them memories of Saratoga Springs—of gray winter skies and green spring mornings—and of life with my father in an old Victorian house. He’d taught me in the library every day, the world outside shut out by thick velvet drapes. Now I felt those lessons had ended too soon.

Mãe released me. “I could teach you,” she said. “Not the same things he did. I can teach you about cooking and plants and horses. About myths and legends, and other things that he doesn’t know. And about kayaking.”

If there’s any antidote for Sunday, it’s kayaking. Even on that hot Florida day, there was a breeze on the river and a sense that time had stopped—that nothing had changed since the Seminoles paddled the same waters.

Mãe’s kayak was yellow and mine was red. She gave me a crash course in basic kayaking skills. Then our boats glided out into a green and golden world.

“I did something stupid this morning.” Mãe’s voice floated across the emerald-tinged water. “I phoned Bennett.”

It didn’t seem stupid to me. “What did he say?”

“No one answered.”

A kingfisher cackled loudly from a branch overhead, and we stopped talking to admire his fierce little face and punk haircut.
Punk
—that’s a word I learned from watching television at my friend Kathleen’s house. Our house in Homosassa had no TV.

“Anyway, I wanted to hear Bennett’s side of things,” Mãe said. “Dashay’s story doesn’t all make sense to me.”

“Then it
isn’t
wrong to meddle, so long as your intentions are good?”

She grinned. “I guess I had that coming. Yes, it’s still wrong. But it’s not as wrong as doing nothing when your best friend’s heart is broken.”

I was about to point out the fallacies in her reasoning when I heard Dashay’s voice in my head:
Let it go, Ari.

So I let it go. Over our heads, the tips of the mangrove trees bent and nodded.

I’d barely begun to explore the area, so when Mãe was ready to turn back, I went on alone, toward Ozello, a village I’d never seen.

Alongside the kayak, a large gray mass suddenly surfaced in the clouded water—a manatee, his rough, wrinkled skin gray and green, crusted with plankton. He came so close I could have touched him, but I didn’t. Mãe had told me once that she didn’t think much of humans interfering with manatees. “They prefer to be left alone,” she said. “Just as we do.”

Two deep scars ran along the manatee’s back, probably made by boat propellers. The state park in Homosassa Springs ran a refuge for injured manatees, releasing them when they’d recovered. I wondered if he’d come from the refuge. He sank out of sight again, the muddy water closing over him. Separation was a means of self-preservation, I supposed. That’s why vampires didn’t intermingle more with mortals, why we had our own culture—our own values, our special tonics, even our own bars.

I moved on, not sure whether I was on the Salt River or St. Martin’s. Homosassa is riddled with inlets. Seven spring-fed rivers run toward the coast, shaping the land like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

White smoke trailed along the horizon and now I saw its source: two hyperbolic cooling towers, part of a nuclear energy plant. Putting aside all the arguments for and against nuclear power, one thing is for certain: the towers don’t become one with the landscape, by any means. They sat, squat and ugly, a testament to man’s disregard (or contempt?) for landscape and natural beauty.

I heard the powerboat before I saw it. The whine of its engine shattered the peace of the place and made a great blue heron perched on a mangrove take flight.

As the boat rounded the bend, it was moving so fast I had no time to maneuver. I saw a blur of a white hull aimed straight for me.

Then I was in the water.

Mãe had told me to pull the release strap on the kayak’s skirt if I needed to get out fast, and I tried that, holding my breath underwater, vowing not to panic. The strap resisted at first, then came free.

Mãe’s voice in my head said: “Kiss the boat. Push up.”

Kissing the boat meant leaning forward, putting my hands on either side of my body so that I could straighten my legs and push up and out. I was nearly free when I felt someone grab me, twist my body, yank it hard.

Then I was breathing again, and when I opened my eyes, I saw unbearably bright shades of yellow and green. My right ankle hurt. I lifted my leg, let it float in the water.

“She’s okay!” The voice behind me sounded elated.

Someone was supporting me, dragging me away from the kayak. He wasn’t tall, but he was muscular, and he reeked of beer.

“Lay back in the water,” he said to me. He wore aviator sunglasses that hid a good part of his face, but I thought he must be seventeen or eighteen. “I’ll pull you to the boat.”

He spoke with so much authority that I didn’t correct his usage, although a stubborn voice in me was crying,
It’s
lie
back.
The shock of being capsized made me somewhat compliant.

The boat was more than twenty feet long, with the name
MY DOLL
painted across its stern, beneath two outboard engines. A green canopy shaded the cockpit. I was hauled aboard as if I’d been a case of beer, passed from hand to hand. I shut my eyes, suddenly dizzy. When I opened them, I was lying on the deck under the canopy, in the company of my rescuer, another boy, and my “new friends” Mysty and Autumn.

The girls looked at me with barely concealed dislike. I sent them back one of their favorite words:
whatever.

But I must have not only thought it but said it, because the boys laughed. All of them, it occurred to me, were very drunk.

I didn’t know whether to feel angry or grateful. At least what had happened to the manatee hadn’t happened to me.

They insisted on taking me and the kayak home. I had misgivings, but I let them. My ankle pain was bearable, and I knew the sprain would heal rapidly; most injuries do, when you’re a vampire. The intensity of the sun did worry me. My scalp had begun to prickle, meaning I’d been overexposed.

I lay beneath the canopy and—forgive me—tuned in to their thoughts. All was not shipshape aboard
My Doll.
The boat didn’t belong to anyone aboard; the boys had “borrowed” it for the day from the marina where Jesse, my rescuer (and in his mind
hero
) worked. Jesse was Autumn’s brother. The other boy was Chip, one of his friends who’d come along to “hang out” with Autumn. The encounter with my kayak cut short their outing, and Autumn and Mysty directed their resentment entirely at me.

Feeling stronger, I sat up. “You know, this is a manatee zone,” I said. “You were speeding.”

The boys couldn’t hear me because of the engine.

Autumn said, “Give me a break. Really.” She wore a black bathing suit that made her look exotic, too sophisticated to be on
My Doll.

“Manatees migrate in the summer,” Mysty said, thinking,
Or is it winter?
She’d been forced to watch a nature documentary in school.

“Some are still around. I saw one today.” I wanted to shout at them, but I knew it wouldn’t change anything. “Should they be driving?” I asked. “They’re pretty drunk.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.” Autumn’s voice was sharp-edged. “Big deal, they had a few beers. You’re the one who drinks that Picardo stuff. We saw it in the liquor store. That stuff is eighty proof!”

“That bartender lied to us.” Mysty looked at me as if
I’d
told the lie back at Flo’s Place. “Why didn’t you say something?”

“I was with my mother.” I spoke without thinking.

The words mollified her. She assumed my mother didn’t know I was drinking alcohol and that the bartender had lied to protect me. She was accustomed to complicated lies, particularly when dealing with parents.

“Your ankle still hurting?” Autumn tossed a pack of cigarettes to me. She’d stopped blaming me.

“I can’t smoke now. Almost home.” I was glad to see Mãe’s dock looming ahead.

At the last possible minute, Jesse slowed the boat. I told him where to tie up, and they lifted me and the kayak ashore.

“I’m fine,” I lied, and managed to walk a few steps. “Thanks.”

“You sure?” Jesse wanted to be a hero as long as he could.

“Very.”

“Come on!” Mysty wanted to get back to the beer party.

“We’ll call you,” Autumn said, her thoughts inscrutable as ever.

I knelt to tie the kayak to cleats on the dock, and I waited until they were gone before I hobbled up the path to the house. I hoped they wouldn’t call.

When I came in, Mãe was sitting on the sofa in the living room, her head bowed, weeping.

“What’s wrong?” I forgot all about my ankle.

She straightened and wiped her eyes with her hand. “I’m sorry, Ariella.” But after she spoke she began to cry again.

I sat next to her. Tentatively I stretched out my hand. She clasped it. Hers was damp.

“It’s everything,” she said. “Dashay. The bees. Your father.”

On her lap was an envelope addressed to her in his handwriting. “What did he write?”

“Nothing.” She wiped her eyes again. “He writes nothing about himself. It’s all about househunting and research and the
colors of the Irish countryside.
” She rubbed her hand on her T-shirt. “Today’s our wedding anniversary! He’s the man who says he remembers everything.”

I tried to think of words to console her. “He doesn’t like to talk about his feelings,” I said.

“I know that,” she said, “better than anyone.”

“At least he writes to
you.
” I’d had only two postcards from my father, postcards that anyone might have read with cursory interest—nothing like the thick envelopes of thin blue paper that came for my mother.

“He wrote to you, too.” Mãe gestured toward the envelopes on the side table. “It came yesterday, along with this one. I was so upset about the bees that I forgot to open the mail until today.”

I reached for the envelope with my name on it, surprised at how happy I felt. But I didn’t open it. I wanted to be alone for that.

Mãe nodded. Then she must have tuned in to my thoughts, because she said, “Oh no. Your ankle? I should have taught you how to roll a kayak.”

Alone in my room I tore open the envelope. It was mostly travelogue: the coast of County Kerry was stark, yet more beautiful than he’d imagined—gray outcroppings of rock against deep green fields, and ruins of castles a commonplace sight.

“History intrudes everywhere,” he wrote. Had I heard about the Skellig monastery? Monks had lived in stone huts resembling beehives on a rocky island in the Atlantic, off the Kerry coast. They’d abandoned the monastery during the twelfth century, he said. They left because of divisiveness after some of the monks became Sanguinists.

He hoped I was keeping up with my reading. Then he quoted some lines from a poem by William Butler Yeats: “O may she live like some green laurel/Rooted in one dear perpetual place.”

At the end, he wrote, “I miss you.”

It was not enough.

Mãe said I had to spend at least a day resting my ankle. Lying immobile made me grumpy. To cheer me up, she brought me magazines she’d bought at the drugstore in town.

These weren’t my preferred magazines. They focused on current events: government, politics, crime, and war. I leafed through them, growing more and more queasy and depressed. My father had called such events “ephemera,” saying that they recurred cyclically. He said that to pay attention to the current phases of the cycles would produce “delusions of control, and in the end, frustration.”

I wondered if my father was correct. True, I couldn’t do much to end war or stop crime. But some part of me felt grimly pleased that I knew a little more about them.

Until now, war had been a historic term to me; historians made wars sound reasonable, understandable, even noble, with analyses of all sides of the conflicts. I looked at the photos in the magazines and thought,
History is just another kind of story.