The Year of Disappearances

by Hubbard, Susan

  One moment, I was half-asleep, half listening to the lecture, feeling mildly annoyed at the prospect of what I thought lay ahead. The next, we were all fully awake, thanks to Jacey’s screaming.

  She saw it first: close to the shore, amid the golden club plants, something dark was floating.

  Jacey said, “What? What?” She screamed again, and then someone else screamed.

  I sat up, but the other canoes blocked my sight. But as we drifted, I had an open view of the shape in the water—dark clothes billowing out and a head of dark hair. The shape looked terribly out of place. It looked wrong.

  The professors took out their cell phones. Neither had a signal. Then they pulled out maps, trying to identify our location and find the best route to a place where the phones would work.

  “Jacey, you okay?” Professor Riley said.

  She’d hunched forward, panting. Later she told me she was trying not to vomit.

  Hoffman told the other girl in Jacey’s canoe to do the rowing. “The rest of you—everybody paddle.”

  We turned the canoes around and Hoffman led us back toward the landing where we’d launched them. The pace of our paddling was twice as fast as it had been on the trip out.

  From time to time I glanced over at Jacey to see if she was okay, but all I saw was the back of her jacket. She still bent forward, head inclined so that she couldn’t see anything beyond the canoe’s interior.

  Bernadette kept looking at Jacey, too, and I heard her say something indistinct. “What did you say?” I said.

  She turned her head sideways. “Jacey looks like the Six of Swords.”

  I remembered the image of that tarot card: a cloaked woman leaning forward in a punt, a ferryman behind her, using a long pole to propel them to shore, and six swords before her, holding her in place. Bernadette had said the card signified escape.

  We felt exhausted by the time we reached the landing. Professor Hoffman called 911, and Professor Riley arranged for the van to pick us up. We’d had enough wilderness to last us a long time.

  The other students were uncharacteristically quiet. No one wanted to talk about what we’d seen until we knew what we’d actually seen, yet no one could think of anything else. Once the van came and we were headed back to campus, Riley insisted on stopping at a fast food place, but no one ate much.

  The campus and our dormitory building looked and smelled reassuringly familiar. Bernadette and I carried our trash bags of supplies and sleeping bags into the room, and I dropped mine in order to turn the light on. But I couldn’t find my lamp.

  “Turn on the overhead,” I told Bernadette.

  When she switched on the bare bulb, the room’s details jumped out at us—our unmade beds, Autumn’s sleeping bag on the floor, and across and around it, the remains of my lithophane lamp. It must have fallen hard, because fine shards of glass and porcelain glittered in a wide arc across the floor. Autumn wasn’t there.

  I felt too shocked and tired to say what I was thinking: Why did Autumn have to break my lamp?

  “Let’s clean it up later,” I said.

  Bernadette looked from the broken glass to me. “But where will Autumn sleep?”

  “We’ll leave her a note,” I said. “We can crash in Jacey’s room, and Autumn can have the sofa in the lounge.” I didn’t care where she slept. I wanted my lamp back.

  Bernadette picked up her trash bag again, and I followed her down the hall to Jacey’s room.

  Bernadette knocked. When Jacey opened the door—her face white, eyes red—Bernadette said, “You’ve got company.”

  When it was time to go to dinner, we stopped back at the room. Autumn still wasn’t there.

  “Where do you suppose your friend is?” Bernadette asked.

  I thought of Autumn and her tendency to get into trouble in the past. “She’s an independent kind of girl,” I said. I hoped she hadn’t broken anything else.

  Very early the next morning, my cell phone rang. Dashay’s voice sounded odd, lacking emotion and inflection. She said, “I’m calling to tell you to expect some visitors.”

  The way she spoke made me think someone else might be listening to our call, so I made my voice neutral, too. “Who’s coming?”

  “Your mother,” she said. “And Cecil. Agent Burton.”

  “May I talk to Mãe?”

  “She’s not here,” Dashay said. “She’s in Georgia, visiting family.”

  The only family my mother had was a sister in Savannah, and she never visited her.

  “Is everything okay?” I asked.

  “She’ll explain when she gets there. She’s already on her way.”

  “How are you?” I asked, feeling as if I were in a play.

  “I am all right.” Her voice bordered on singsong. “I took a trip to Atlanta last week, to look up an old friend.”

  She must mean Bennett, I thought. “How is he?”

  “He and his fiancée are very well.”

  Dashay’s artificial calm began to worry me. Soon after that, we said good-bye.

  I went back to our room and stepped around the glass shards to get my towels and shampoo. After a shower and a change of clothes, I realized how hungry I was. Bernadette was still asleep, so I went to the lounge to see if Autumn wanted breakfast. But the old couch in the lounge was vacant.

  I went to breakfast alone.

  Back in the room again, I was sweeping up the remains of my lamp when Mãe came in. I dropped the broom to hug her. When we pulled apart, the sight of her face alarmed me—she looked drained, as if she hadn’t slept in days.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  That’s when Agent Burton walked in. He apologized for disturbing us, but his voice didn’t sound sorry.

  At his suggestion we went to the library, to a closed-off nook called a carrel. Burton took out his tape recorder and coughed a few times to test it. He looked more somber than I’d ever seen him.

  Then he told me that the thing in the swamp was a body, and the body was Autumn’s.

  Later—after a week of being interviewed by Burton and the Georgia State Police, of being given a series of polygraph tests, of walking around in a state of shock—I listened to my mother apologize. She said she’d wanted to call, warn me about what was coming, but she and Dashay decided it was better for the police to witness my first reactions to the news.

  By the end of that week, Burton felt fairly certain that I hadn’t caused Autumn’s death (she’d been strangled, he said, but they weren’t sure where it had happened), but he was troubled by what he considered the “unbelievable coincidence” of three girls who knew me disappearing and two (at least) ending up dead. (To a lesser degree, he was troubled by the polygraph’s measurement of my abnormally low skin temperature, which Mãe persuaded him was a side effect of treatment for “a rare form of lupus—the same kind that killed her father”).

  Then came word that one of the dorm’s resident advisors told police she’d seen a stranger carrying an oversized trash bag out of the dorm the morning we’d left for the swamp.

  “I figured he was part of the canoe trip,” she said. She hadn’t been close enough to get more than a general impression of the man. Medium height, she said. Bald. Wearing sunglasses and dark clothes.

  I told Burton about the beige van I’d seen approaching campus as we left for Okefenokee.

  “We put out an alert last time you mentioned a van,” he said. “Nothing turned up.”

  “Well, you’d better put out another one,” my mother said. “Someone killed that girl, and he’s still out there.”

  He thought I’d imagined the van, but he did make a note.

  “What if”—I framed the question as I asked it—”what if whoever took Autumn was really after me?”

  To my surprise, Burton had already thought of that. Yes, I was listening to his thoughts again. He was brooding on the placement of the body, how likely it was that whoever killed her had known the route of our canoes, had wanted us to find her.

&n
bsp; “Anything’s possible,” he said. “All we can do now is conjecture.”

  Aside from signs of struggle—the broken lamp, the sleeping bag half-turned inside out—the dorm room held no evidence of the presence of anyone aside from Autumn, Bernadette, and me. But the police had found the note Bernadette left for Autumn, and they questioned Chip, her ex-boyfriend. Chip’s alibi—that he’d been trying to steal a car on the night in question—didn’t impress them much. They’d also questioned Jesse and Autumn’s father, both in Sassa and in Georgia, where they’d volunteered to come. At the family’s request, I met Mr. Springer and Jesse one afternoon at the brick police station.

  Mr. Springer was a middle-aged man, overweight, who perspired heavily and barely spoke. He had Autumn’s chin and eyes. Jesse looked different—his head was shaved, and he’d lost weight. His eyes were clear, and every move he made seemed purposeful.

  “We know you had nothing to do with it,” he told me. “We just want you to tell us what happened.”

  I told them the same details I’d told the police about Autumn’s visit. She hadn’t seemed upset so much as depressed about the breakup with Chip. And I mentioned her phone call to me, when she’d told me Jesse was joining the marines. “She sounded very proud of you,” I said.

  He straightened his shoulders for a moment, nodded as if to say thanks. He and his father hated talking about Autumn’s death. It made them feel powerless.

  My time as a person of interest ended after the forensics lab found DNA under Autumn’s fingernails. The sample they took from me didn’t match it.

  The last thing Burton said to me was, “Call me if you remember anything else. Meantime, please be careful.”

  I thought about the night in the tent, the thing outside, the weird noises. If I mentioned any of that, Burton would once again think I was imagining things. But Mãe must have heard what I thought. As we walked to the truck, she checked to be sure I was wearing my cat amulet.

  During the week of my interrogations (that’s how I’ve thought of it ever since), I lost my normal sense of taste, smell, sound, and touch, and I saw things without taking in details.

  In my philosophy class, the professor had told us about “philosophical zombies”: hypothetical creatures who act like humans, but who lack any sense of being alive. They can walk, talk, eat, drink—without any subjective sense of the experience. That week, I felt like a zombie.

  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 t
he 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?”