The Year of Disappearances

by Hubbard, Susan

  And why were vampires so invisible?

  As usual, I left the library with more questions than I’d had when I walked in.

  The post office served as the hub of Sassa, the place where you’d run into the whole town(s) if you lingered long enough.

  Two girls about my age leaned against the building. Like me, they wore cutoff jeans and tank tops that showed the straps of bathing suits underneath. Their eyes were invisible behind oversized sunglasses, but I knew they were appraising me.

  The tall one with shoulder-length dark hair tilted her head to survey me from head to toe. The other girl had golden ringlets that framed her face, which had a doll’s tiny features, and a rose tattoo on her right wrist. Her glances were more discreet.

  But the dark-haired one looked more interesting, to me. The way she stood, the way she wore her clothes, made her look older, sophisticated, cool.

  For a second I thought about stopping to talk to them. Maybe they were new in town, like me. I hadn’t had a friend my age for a long time.

  A beige-colored van idled in the post office parking lot. The driver’s window was rolled down. The driver was a big man with a shaved head and fleshy lips. Even though he wore sunglasses, I knew his eyes were fixed on the girls.

  By the time a girl turns fourteen, she’s accustomed to men staring. But this man showed more than casual interest. He’d turned his thick torso to face the window, and he leaned forward, his mouth half-open.

  Another thing about the man: he wasn’t human. But he wasn’t a vampire—I could sense that even from fifty feet away, even if I couldn’t tell you then how I knew. He was another kind of other.

  The two girls watched me, not him. I slid off my own sunglasses and let them see the direction of my eyes. I jerked my head in the direction of the van, to be sure they got the message.

  That’s when the driver saw me. When he took off his sunglasses, I flinched. His eyes were entirely white; they had no pupils. He must have seen my reaction, because suddenly the van jerked backward out of the handicapped parking space.

  Before he drove away, he smiled at me—and the worst part was, I recognized the smile. I’d seen him earlier that summer, crossing a street in Sarasota, a day or so before the fire and the hurricane. Then, and now, I had a feeling hard to describe, a combination of revulsion and paralysis and fear, dark and swirling in me. I felt I’d encountered evil.

  The dark-haired girl said, “Relax. He’s only a perv.” Her voice was low pitched and close to a monotone.

  I wish she’d known then how wrong she was.

  She said, “I’m Autumn.” The most expressive part of her face was the dark sunglasses.

  “You must have a birthday coming soon,” I said.

  “My birthday’s in May.” She kicked the wall behind her with her flip-flop. “My mother just had to name me after her favorite season.” The sarcasm in her voice made favorite season a deep shade of red, bordering on purple. But I sensed she didn’t share my ability to see words in color.

  “My name’s Ari.” I turned toward the blond girl.

  “Mysty.” She was able to talk and chew gum at the same time. “Spelled with a Y.” She pronounced spelled like spayled.

  Autumn said, “Two wahs.”

  I looked at them, and they looked at me. “I’m going swimming,” I said after several seconds of mutual scrutiny. “Want to come?”

  Mysty yawned, but she thought, Why not?

  Autumn said, “Whatever.” I couldn’t hear what she was thinking.

  Listening to others’ thoughts is one of the compensations of being a vampire. But it calls for concentration, and it works much better with some minds than with others.

  After a brief swim in the river—the shallow water felt too warm to be refreshing—we sat on an old dock to dry off. I’d brought an oversized towel with me, which had plenty of room for the three of us. Autumn and Mysty lay back on the towel to sunbathe while I reapplied thick coats of sunblock. They talked as if they’d known each other forever, but from their thoughts I knew better.

  Autumn’s family, the Springers, had lived in Sassa for more than twenty years, and Mysty was a relative newcomer, like me; she’d arrived four months ago. Both of them were far wiser than I was in the ways of the world.

  “Seein’ Chip tonight?” Mysty asked, her voice lazy.

  “He says he has to work.” Autumn’s voice was dismissive.

  “You put all that stuff on, you’ll never get a tan.”

  It took me a second to realize that Mysty was talking to me. “I never tan,” I said. “I’m susceptible to burning.”

  Autumn said, “I’m susceptible to burning,” in a higher-pitched version of my voice. “What the hell is susceptible?” she said in her own voice, low and hoarse.

  Mysty flipped onto her stomach. “Lordy, give me a cigarette,” she said.

  Autumn took a battered pack of Salems out of her jeans pocket. She wriggled out a cigarette and threw it in Mysty’s direction. Then she threw a second one at me. I picked the cigarette up and looked at it.

  Autumn sat up, a cigarette stuck to her lip, and fished a matchbook out of another pocket. She lit Mysty’s cigarette. Mysty cupped her small hands around the match, even though there was no wind.

  Autumn turned to me. “No, hold it like this,” she said. She opened the fingers of her right hand into wide vees and inserted the cigarette between her index and middle fingers. “How old are you, anyhow?”

  “Fourteen,” I said.

  “And you never smoked?”

  Mysty watched us, smoking. She didn’t need instruction.

  “Make your fingers relax.” Autumn’s brown hair wasn’t nearly as long as mine, I thought. Mine reached my waist.

  “Dang it, you look like you’re holding a pen. Here, watch.”

  She removed the unlit cigarette from her mouth and held it in her left hand, her fingers loose, almost limp. With her right thumb she slid open the cover of the matchbook and folded a single match so the head of it just reached the emery strip. Then she swept the match head against the strip with her thumb. The match flared on the first try and she lit the cigarette, taking a deep drag. She blew smoke in my face and handed the cigarette to me.

  “Don’t you try to light a match that way,” she said. “Sometimes the whole book goes up. You can really burn yourself.”

  I brought the cigarette to my lips and sucked tentatively. The smoke scorched my mouth and throat; I felt as if I were back in the smoke-filled condominium on the night of the fire. I coughed so hard I thought I might faint.

  Their laughter sounded like artificial coughs. They must have practiced that laugh, I thought. Autumn laughed so hard her sunglasses fell off, and I saw her eyes—dark brown, elongated, with a weary expression and a flicker of something in her left eye that caught my eye, glimmered, then blazed.

  She put the glasses on again.

  I handed her the cigarette and reached for the water bottle in my backpack. The water helped, but afterward my throat still felt raw. I knew I’d never get the hang of smoking. Yet I vowed to prove some other way that I was worthy of their friendship. They knew things that I didn’t know.

  But they didn’t strike me as particularly good company. Mysty’s thoughts were a jumble of cattiness (Autumn’s half as cool as she thinks she is), greed (Just let Autumn try to steal my fries at lunch), and self-doubt (Am I fatter than Autumn?). When I tried to tune in to Autumn’s thoughts, all I heard was static. Listening for even a few minutes made me tired.

  Sounding bored, Autumn said her brother Jesse had a car and could drive us to the mall sometime. I didn’t know where the mall was. But I said why not. I gave her the number of my cell phone.

  I walked home slowly, carrying my backpack, feeling the weight of my damp hair heavy on my shoulders, breathing in the world around me—the cicadas, the tall grasses, the songs of the mockingbirds, the hard blue sky. The landscape pulsed heat and humidity and smelled of sun-baked weeds. Since the hurricane
and the fire, details of the natural world announced themselves to me more loudly, vividly, than before. Before, I’d noticed, but I’d taken them somewhat for granted, I’m afraid.

  Then my skin began to tingle. I stopped moving. Something was watching me.

  I made a slow turn to the left, then to the right, seeing nothing but bushes and trees. Finally I spun around. The road behind me was empty. I told myself the sun was making my skin sensitive. But I knew better.

  I walked on, slowly, measuring the intensity of my reaction with every step. Gradually my skin calmed again. Whatever had been watching me had moved on.

  After the gate, the dirt path to the house curved to the right, and Grace bounded down to meet me. We came around the final curve and there stood the house, only its front limestone wall intact. A savory smell came from the kitchen, one of my mother’s astonishing soups—garlic, cucumbers, basil, and tomatoes, as well as red wine vinegar and lashings of Sangfroid crystals and the tonic that kept us from drinking human blood.

  Yes, we still had the urge to drink blood. I couldn’t tell you which appetite was stronger, which one propelled me home.

  At lunch I handed my mother the pages I’d printed. Only the two of us sat at the table. Her friend Dashay, who co-owned the property, and Dashay’s boyfriend, Bennett, were in Jamaica to attend a funeral. They’d be back in a week.

  “So much speculation,” she said, after she’d read them. She said she’d called the state agricultural office a few minutes before I’d come home, and left a message on their voice mail.

  I told Mãe about the girls I’d met at the post office.

  “What are their last names?” she asked.

  I didn’t remember.

  “What do their parents do?”

  “That never came up,” I said. Did she think I cared about such things?

  I was going to tell her about the man in the van when she pushed her chair back from the table. Her shirt was stained (with tomato juice or tonic?), her auburn hair had fallen down completely, and her eyes had the worried cast that made them seem darker. But her skin glowed as if it were made of pearl dust. She was as beautiful as ever.

  She smiled, as if she appreciated the compliment. “I’m glad you found some friends,” she said. “It’s lonely without Dashay and the horses.” And the bees. And Raphael, she thought.

  Yes, I missed Dashay. And I missed the bees, and the horses, too. They’d stay at a friend’s farm in Kissimmee until our own stables were rebuilt.

  And yes, I missed Raphael. I missed my father most of all.

  Some voices have undernotes of rusty hinges. Others hint of water gurgling down slow drains. But most vampires’ speech is melodic, measured, sometimes as lyrical as a song. I guess it’s because our sense of hearing is so acute. We can hear our own voices, and most mortals don’t pay attention to their own.

  After lunch I’d taken a nap. I must have been asleep for hours, because when I opened my eyes, the light in the room had turned blue-gray. The wrinkled ceiling overhead reminded me of the underbelly of an ocean floor. From outside, voices drifted in, fluid and fluent as music. My mother’s voice counterpointed that of her best friend, Dashay.

  I pushed my hair away from my face and sat up. Their voices floated through my open window.

  They sat outside in what remained of the moon garden. Once, pale night-blooming flowers had filled the circular borders behind the benches. But the hurricane left bare roots, broken stems, and piles of leaves and debris. The benches, upended against the house during the storm, now were set face to face. The sun must have just slipped beneath the horizon, because the sky had turned indigo—not blue, not quite violet, but a color in between. The color of secrets, I thought.

  My mother, facing me, sat slumped in her chair, listening.

  Is it wrong to eavesdrop? Of course. But if you’d seen the unhappiness on my mother’s face, you wouldn’t have been able to resist. I did resist listening to their thoughts.

  Dashay’s words poured out in clusters so fast that they ran into each other, and she spoke with an accent and lilt I’d heard only hints of before.

  “Then I told them, I told them no, how can you be so quick to judge, but they do not listen, they are all against me, they tell me to go, and then I look for Bennett, I go after him, I look all through the trees, but he’s not there, he’s not there.” Her shoulders were shaking.

  I didn’t want to hear any more. Bennett had been Dashay’s true love, or so I’d thought. He was a tall man with broad shoulders and a beautiful smile. I’d watched them dance one moonlit night in our garden, turning and dipping, their hands clasped, and I’d thought, Someday, I want to have what they have.

  I didn’t want to hear any more, but I couldn’t stay away. From the house’s west side, still unfinished and open, I could see Dashay’s face.

  She was crying. I’d read the expression that tears “well,” but I’d never seen it happen before; tears continually reached the lower brims of her eyes and overflowed, streamed down her face. Her white skirt was streaked gray with tears. And she said words I didn’t understand: “Duppy get the blame, but man feel the pain.”

  My mother left her bench and bent over Dashay, wrapped her arms around her, pulled her out of the chair. They stood, holding each other in the ruined garden. The sky turned from indigo to midnight blue to black.

  I turned away, surprised (but not for the first time) that I felt jealous of their friendship.

  The next morning, I awoke with the sense that everything was normal. The blue plastic ceiling seemed to breathe with the wind, the air smelled of sawdust, and the tapping of hammers broke the rhythm of “Iron Man,” a song the radio played at least once every day.

  But when I looked outside, I noticed something new. In the moon garden, all around the chair where Dashay had sat, bloomed tiny white flowers. Her tears had been their seeds.

  Chapter Two

  After breakfast my mother led me outside, handed me a hammer, and introduced me to Leon, a member of the framing crew, who showed me where to put the nails.

  We were nailing plywood to two-by-fours, don’t ask me why. I’m sure Leon would have told me if I’d asked. My mind wasn’t on what we were building. I wanted to be inside. Dashay would be getting up soon, and she and Mãe would be talking. I wanted to hear the details.

  But no, I had to help rebuild the house. It felt like being outside a movie theater or a playhouse; all the drama was on the inside, and I was left to imagine the plot.

  Leon offered me some of the lemonade in his thermos. He was a muscular man with a deep suntan, dark eyes, and multicolored tattoos of knives and roses along his arms and neck. The rest—I just knew he had more—were covered by his T-shirt and jeans.

  “How old are you?” he asked me abruptly.

  “Fourteen.”

  “Fourteen going on thirty.”

  My father had told me that. Some days (usually when I felt tired), I looked much older than others.

  The lemonade tasted tart yet sweet. I watched blisters on my right palm raise and almost at once fade away, but I quickly closed my hand so that Leon wouldn’t see. I figured he didn’t know we were vampires, and Mãe had taught me not to flaunt the fact.

  The radio played a song called “Love Bites.” Leon said, “Ain’t that the truth.”

  Quitting time was at five. I ran into the house and almost collided with Dashay. She wore a saffron-colored caftan and her long hair was wrapped in a green silk scarf. She looked aloof and regal. But she gave me a hug—not nearly as emphatic as her usual hugs—and a strained smile.

  “I missed you,” I said.

  Tears appeared in her caramel-colored eyes.

  “Enough crying.” Mãe’s voice was brisk. She wore a dark blue dress and a string of lemon-colored beads. “Hurry and change, Ariella. Put on a dress. We girls are going to town.”

  Happy hour at Flo’s Place wasn’t happy that night.

  The regulars sat at the bar and in the booths, g
lasses of red wine and Picardo in their hands. But not everyone drank the red stuff. Here and there you could spot a glass of beer or white wine, mostly in the hands of mortals.

  No one at our table was talking. Mãe and Dashay looked like beautiful statues.

  So it came as a relief when the door to Flo’s was flung open and Mysty and Autumn strutted inside. They walked in short steps, leading with their bellies, prominent thanks to low-slung jeans and abbreviated, tight tops. I adjusted a strap of my cotton sundress and thought I must look about ten.

  Autumn and Mysty had done something to enlarge their hair. Their sunglasses were pushed back on their heads, and their eyes were lined and lashed and shadowed. Autumn glanced at me, gave me a nod and a wave. But they didn’t come over. They headed straight for the bar.

  Mãe and Dashay didn’t notice them at first, but I watched as the girls tried to order beer.

  After some exchanges with the bartender, Autumn said, “Ain’t our money good here?” in a high-pitched voice that cut through Johnny Cash singing “Ring of Fire.” Everyone in the place stopped talking.

  “This ID is fake. I can’t serve you.” The bartender, whose name was Logan, was tall and good looking, with dark red hair. He was one of us. “We’d lose our license,” he said.

  Autumn turned and looked directly at me. “Well, you served her.”

  A half-full glass of Picardo sat innocently before me on the table.

  “Who are they?” Dashay said.

  Mãe said to me, “Those are the girls you met the other day?”

  I nodded. Autumn kept staring at me, waiting for me to say something, to come to their defense. But what could I say?

  Logan laughed, and some of the tension went out of the room. “She’s drinking Picardo. There’s no alcohol in that. You want to try some?”

  He poured an inch of Picardo into a shot glass and handed the glass to Mysty. She looked at it dubiously, then raised the glass and shot the bright red liquid down her throat. Almost immediately she made a gagging sound and spat it onto the floor. “Gross!” she said.