The Year of Disappearances

by Hubbard, Susan

  Yes, I told my mother, I could see myself at Hillhouse. “A legacy,” I said.

  “If you have to leave me, I’d rather you were there than anywhere else.” Her profile turned away from me, but I saw her jaw clench and the right corner of her mouth turn downward.

  “I’m not really leaving you,” I said. “Am I?”

  “You’re beginning to take your place in the world.” She tried to brighten up. “It will be good for you, Ariella. And it’s not that far from home.”

  We drove for a while, not talking. Finally I said, “Mãe? Who’s the King?”

  She told me about Elvis Presley, the rockabilly singer who became an international pop idol. She told me that people still claimed he never died, claimed they saw him walking through malls and airports. Some thought he might be a vampire. Then she sang to me, a song called “Heartbreak Hotel.” It might have been Dashay’s theme song, I thought.

  Now I knew about the King. Why he so appealed to the Hillhouse chemistry faculty forever remained a mystery.

  We came home to an empty house. But the half-full cup of tea on the kitchen table was still warm, and next to it lay a copy of the local newspaper, opened to a page with a photo of Jesse on it.

  I skimmed the article. He’d told the police a new version of the night he’d arranged to meet Mysty—in this one, he couldn’t remember whether she’d turned up or not. He claimed to have lost his memory of the night in question. He was now considered the only person of interest in the case. The police still didn’t have enough evidence to name him a suspect.

  “The night in question.” “Person of interest.” What a strange language people speak when they talk about crime.

  When Mãe and I heard the sound—a low-pitched nicker—we stood up at the same moment. The horses had come home.

  We ran down to the stable. A long white horse van was parked next to it. Dashay must have driven it from Kissimmee, where the horses had been boarded while the stable was repaired.

  A stone statue of a woman riding a horse stood at the stable entrance. She was Epona, the goddess of horses, and she’d moved with us to Kissimmee when the hurricane struck. Dashay must have brought her back.

  Inside, amid the sweet smells of new lumber and hay, they were waiting for us in their stalls: Osceola, Abiaka, Billie, and my favorite, Johnny Cypress. They were named after leaders of the Seminole tribe. Johnny shook his black mane at the sight of us.

  Dashay was there, too, brushing Abiaka. “We got back this afternoon,” she said. “I came down to tell them good night. They’re happy to be home.”

  Some people claim that animals don’t experience the emotions people ascribe to them—that they care only about food and water and shelter. Those people haven’t spent much time around horses.

  Or cats. Grace came into the stable and headed straight for Billie, her own favorite. Billie was a cream-colored mare with patient manners. She lowered her head and sighed through her nostrils as Grace rubbed against her foreleg.

  Our family wasn’t complete, but the horses helped. We spent the next day riding, going down back trails that meandered toward the gulf. Snails’ trails, Mãe called them, because they twisted and turned arbitrarily. Billie stayed behind with Grace for company. In the old days, Bennett had ridden Billie.

  At noon we stopped on a beach near Ozello for lunch at a little restaurant called Peck’s. We ate oysters and shrimp at picnic benches outside. From where we sat we couldn’t see the nuclear power plant, and I tried to forget it existed.

  A cool breeze swept in over the water. The sight of my mother and Dashay, and the horses grazing nearby, made me feel at peace. I didn’t let myself think about the future, about the prospect of leaving them.

  After lunch Dashay went over to Abiaka and talked to her for several minutes. Dashay’s mouth was close to Abiaka’s ear, and her voice was too low for us to hear.

  Mãe shook her head, telling me not to try to listen in, but somehow I knew that Dashay was talking about her heartbreak.

  She reminded me of a short story by Anton Chekhov called “Misery.” The story’s epigraph is “To whom shall I tell my sorrow?” An old man tries to tell the story of his son’s death to the customers who ride in his carriage. No one will listen, and in the end he confides in his horse.

  Later that week, when I sat down to work on the application for Hillhouse, my personal experience essay was inspired by Chekhov, Dashay, and the animals who suffer our confessions so patiently.

  Chapter Nine

  Naming an emotion is the first step in coming to terms with it. Researchers have found that the amygdala, the part of the brain that triggers negative feelings, is calmed when we give our feelings names. That’s why we feel better after we confess to animals.

  The amygdala is considered a part of the reptile brain, devoted to our physical survival. Some scientists claim that meditation, or the Buddhist practice of “mindfulness,” keeps the amygdala under control.

  My father had taught me the practice of daily meditation, but I’d discontinued it when I left Saratoga Springs. Now, as I prepared to leave my home in Florida, I began to meditate again. It helped me cope with the anxiety I felt at the thought of leaving home.

  Hillhouse had what were called “rolling deadlines” for applications, but I wanted to send mine in as soon as possible. The second essay was supposed to focus on art imitating life, or vice versa. I chose to analyze a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, which begins:

  As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;

  As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

  Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s

  Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

  Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

  Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

  Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

  Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.

  The images and the language mesmerized me. I’d seen kingfishers and dragonflies in the air, and I felt the truth of the lines, but I had to read them several times before I began to understand them. I wrote about watching kingfishers and dragonflies, about the congruence between what they are and what they do, and about how this truth applies to humans: their actions define them. I wondered, did that apply to vampires as well? But I couldn’t write about vampires. Once again, I censored myself.

  The final essay was to express how the applicant envisioned herself as a part of Hillhouse. This one stumped me. I went to find my mother.

  Mãe was in her study, writing a letter on the thin blue paper that she used for transatlantic mail.

  “How might I ‘envision’ myself ‘as a part of Hillhouse’?” I asked.

  She frowned. “Do you want me to be one of those parents who tells you the answers?”

  “Of course not.” I’d read online that some college applicants actually hired others to write their admission essays, and I wondered: Didn’t they realize how such actions defined them? “But I don’t know how much of an outsider I’ll need to be. It’s not as if I can tell everyone I’m a vampire.”

  She set down her pen. “Why don’t you look at the student jobs listed in the catalog? One of them might inspire you.”

  I took her advice, and I ended up writing an essay about joining the stables crew, since I knew how to listen to horses as well as talk to them.

  With the application sent off, I found myself daydreaming about the future. My father sent me a letter in which he discussed college in the most general terms. He made no mention of me becoming a doctor or a scientist. He quoted W. B. Yeats: “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”

  The quotation struck me as a peculiar choice, considering that earlier that summer we’d nearly burned to death.

  Then he wrote: “Speaking of fire, you and your mother had better burn my letters. With so many police around, it’s better that I stay dead.”

  I wrote back a
long description of Hillhouse and a summary of my essays. I told him I’d asked to live in one of the “quiet” dorms, where loud noise was prohibited after 10 P.M. Finally, I wrote, “We miss you.”

  But after I sealed the letter, I thought twice. If I sent it, he’d feel reassured that all was well in Sassa. And it wasn’t.

  I destroyed the first letter and wrote a new one. It began: “Dear Father, I have been learning how to smoke cigarettes.” It went on to talk about my persistent sense that someone was watching me, about my vertigo, and about my dreams of the fire. I mentioned hypnotizing a local boy being questioned in the disappearance of a friend. I thought of adding that Mãe was flirting with bartenders, but that seemed cruel, so I simply said, “Mãe and Dashay are prone to crying lately.” I ended with: “Yes, we will burn your letters. It’s really a blessing that you’re not here.”

  Then I went to Mãe’s office to find a stamp.

  November faded into December—for many, the holiday season. When I was growing up, we celebrated Christmas in a most restrained, secular way: useful gifts for me from my father and his assistants, Root and Dennis. Dennis had made us observe the holiday.

  My mother and Dashay told me they celebrated the winter solstice with a Yule feast.

  “No presents?” I asked.

  Plenty of presents, they told me. They knew I hadn’t received many when I was growing up. And we’d even have our own Yule tree—something I’d only glimpsed through other people’s windows, back in Saratoga Springs.

  One mid-December day I decided to use my allowance to buy presents for them. December weather was much cooler (high temperatures in the seventies), and the ride into town went quickly. The streets were busier, now that the search for Mysty had been called off. According to the newspaper, the police said they had no leads.

  Sassa didn’t offer many shopping opportunities. I decided that the pharmacy was my best bet.

  For Dashay, I found copper-colored eye shadow with glitter in it, two red candles, and a lemon-colored T-shirt captioned SASSY in silver. Mãe was more complicated. I finally settled on crystal-studded hair ornaments: two shaped like dragonflies, two like stars, one like a crescent moon, and one like a honeybee. Having decided the honeybee might depress her, I was sliding it back onto the display pin when someone said my name.

  Autumn leaned against a cosmetics display as if she’d been there awhile, watching me. “I need to talk to you,” she said.

  I paid for my presents, and she followed me into the parking lot.

  “I wanted to come to your house, but I think the cops might be trailing me.” She beckoned me toward a bench under a live oak tree. “If we talk here, it’s like we ran into each other, no big deal.”

  She looked thinner than she’d been the last time I’d seen her. Her jeans weren’t so tight now, and her sweater sagged around her waist and hips. Her eyes had shadows under them, but no demon light gleamed from her irises. I checked.

  “Listen, you got to help Jesse.” She nodded, as if agreeing with herself. “He’s in a bad way. He’s using something, I don’t know what.”

  “Drugs?” I said.

  “Yeah, but not like X or crack.” She bent her head, then looked up at me. “You know about that stuff?”

  I’d read about it online. I nodded.

  “So he’s doing some drug that makes him really stupid. He can’t remember anything. And I figured, since you got him off alcohol, maybe you could help him kick this stuff.” Autumn rubbed her face hard, beneath her eyes, leaving reddish crescents along her cheekbones. “Ari, he screwed up the lie detector tests. And they found some of Mysty’s blood and hair in his car. He respects you. Won’t you help?” Her voice cracked, and that’s when I knew that I would try.

  Autumn and Jesse lived in a trailer park. The sign called it HARMONY HOMES MANOR, but it was a trailer park: row after row of mobile homes, some well maintained, with fake shutters on the windows and small gardens near the entrances, others looking as if they’d been abandoned—or should be. As we walked our bikes into the place (the road was too pitted with holes to ride), Autumn told me about the case against Jesse. “All they have is a tiny spot of blood and a few hairs, but they definitely belong to her.”

  “She rode in the car quite a bit, didn’t she?”

  “That’s what I told them.”

  “And that day we came back from the mall, she picked at her arm until it bled.” I had a vivid image of the blood welling on her arm.

  Autumn stopped walking. “I’d forgotten all about that. That’s where the bloodstain on the seat must have come from.”

  I wasn’t as convinced as she was. For all I knew, Jesse might be guilty.

  But when I saw him, I was sure he wasn’t. He was sitting at the kitchen table inside the trailer, his head supported by his hands, elbows braced against the oilcloth table cover patterned with small pink pigs. Pig-shaped salt and pepper shakers stood next to a large bottle of ketchup on the table, and the place smelled like years of fried food.

  Jesse looked up when we came in. “Hey,” he said. “Hey…”

  I realized he was trying to think of my name. His eyes were bloodshot, and he’d grown a beard. “I’m Ari,” I said.

  “Ari.” He smiled.

  “I like the beard,” I said. I sat at the table opposite him. “Autumn, leave us alone to talk, would you?”

  When she went outside, I bent forward and looked into Jesse’s eyes. The irises were dark brown with hazel flecks. No sign of inner demons, as far as I could see.

  He didn’t mind my scrutiny—in fact, he liked it. He batted his long eyelashes and tried to decide if I wanted him to kiss me.

  Yes, I was listening to his thoughts. I felt the situation warranted it. But they were jumbled; as soon as one formed, it fell apart and became half of something else.

  I said, “Tell me what happened the night Mysty disappeared.”

  He stopped smiling and slid his chin into the cup of his palm again. “I don’t remember.” He said it without expression. But he did remember; he was thinking of a car’s headlights approaching out of darkness, while he watched, and Mysty was sitting next to him—no, she went back to his car for cigarettes—no, she stayed where she was. Maybe there weren’t any car headlights.

  “Jesse, look at me.” He looked up, his eyes full of confusion. “I want to help you. Do you trust me?”

  He nodded. “Ari,” he said.

  “Then I want you to look at me, look into my eyes, and I want you to relax…”

  Before I’d figured out what to say next, he was in a deep trance.

  The night Mysty disappeared, she showed up at the river dock carrying an old plaid wool blanket. “I said, ‘Why’d you bring a blanket? It ain’t cold.’” Jesse’s voice was soft and slow. “And she said, ‘Who wants to sit on the cold hard ground?’

  “I knew what she was thinking.” His eyes were shut, but his eyelids twitched. “She wanted to make out. Whatever. But I like this other girl. Her name’s Ari. She’s got class.”

  I should not be hearing this, I thought.

  “So you and Mysty sat on the blanket?” I said.

  “Yeah, until she went back to my car. Autumn keeps a pack of cigarettes in the glove compartment. I was parked on the shoulder of the road—you know Maythorn Street? That’s where we were, at the end of Maythorn. I sat there and watched her go. She was in my car when I saw the headlights—another car coming down the street. It stopped next to mine. I heard voices, but I couldn’t hear the words, you know? I figured it was somebody she knew. So I was laying back, half asleep for I don’t know how long. Maybe ten minutes? I don’t wear a watch. I try to tell the cops, why wear a watch? It only gets in the way.”

  “So ten minutes went by,” I said.

  “I guess.” His hands lay limp on his knees. The only things moving were the muscles in his eyelids. He didn’t speak.

  “And—?”

  “And that’s all I know.” His breathing was smooth and regular.
“She must have got into that car. Or maybe she went back home. She always liked to change her mind.”

  “You didn’t see her again?”

  “No, I didn’t. People keep asking me that. I don’t know why they don’t believe me.”

  “What kind of car was it? The one that came down the street.”

  “It was too dark to tell. All I saw was headlights, set kind of high off the ground. Maybe it was a truck or an SUV.”

  Somewhere in the trailer, a telephone rang. I told him to ignore the sound. After six rings, it stopped.

  “Jesse,” I said, my voice reminding me of my mother’s when she tried to calm me. “What kind of drugs are you taking?”

  He smiled. “You want some?”

  “Show me.”

  He lifted his right hand, moved it to the pocket of his flannel shirt. He managed to unbutton it, his eyes still shut, and pulled out a prescription bottle. He handed it to me.

  The prescription label was in the name of his sister, for amoxicillin, which I knew was a common antibiotic. I opened the bottle and shook out a few pills into my hand. They were dark red capsules, each bearing a small black V.

  “Where’d you get these, Jesse?”

  “My buddy bought them in Crystal River. They’re sweet. A good mellow high.”

  I thought of Root’s e-mail: Sugar pill. I put the cap on the bottle and slid it into my backpack.

  “You don’t need to take these. You don’t want to take them. Are you hearing me?”

  He nodded, docile as ever.