The Year of Disappearances

by Hubbard, Susan

  “Jacey says you’re telling people not to drink water,” he said.

  “Bottled water can be risky,” I said carefully.

  “Bottled water, tap water—it’s all risky.” He leaned forward, his fuzzy hair catching the light from the TV. “Who knows what the government puts in our water? The Social Ecologists Club has been on to that issue for more than a year. You ought to come to our next meeting.”

  “I’m not much of a joiner,” I said, and excused myself.

  I walked through the corridors on all three floors of the dorm, looking into the rooms with open doors. Then I gave up on Bernadette. Why should I care where she spent the night? So long as she showed up eventually. So long as she didn’t completely disappear.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The next two weeks passed before I knew where I was or what I was doing. Our professors suddenly elevated their expectations and demands. When I thought I couldn’t read or write another word, I read another book and wrote another paper.

  This, it turned out, was the Hillhouse tradition: low pressure on students all semester coupled with certainty that their self-motivation would drive them to produce first-rate results by semester’s end.

  The tradition took some getting used to. Three first-year students and two sophomores gave up and went home to recover from stress. Most of the juniors and seniors knew enough to stock up on caffeine and pills that kept them awake; they strode among us with bloodshot eyes and cynical sneers, like battle-hardened veterans.

  But while some of us—such as Jacey, Richard, and me—virtually lived in the library and spent hour after hour at the computer keyboard when we weren’t in class or at our work assignments, a large number of the others blissfully self-medicated themselves against academic achievement. I was tired of the sight of Bernadette—yes, she did come back—wandering in and out of our room at all hours, sometimes with Walker in tow, sometimes with another boy or a couple of girls. She’d given up regular hygiene habits, and I could literally smell her before she came in. Sometimes I found a T-shirt or underwear that belonged to me, balled up on the floor, carrying the same smell. I washed the T-shirt, but I threw the underwear away.

  Walker didn’t smell yet, probably because he liked to walk in the rain. Still, when I stood near him during our shifts at the recycling center, I noticed how straggly his hair and beard had become. He talked to me sometimes, a kind of stream-of-consciousness ramble. I felt sorry for him. After a while, I tried to avoid him.

  Those two weeks were the period when the campus split into two groups, defined by use of the drug Vallanium. The younger students seemed more prone to take it, maybe because they tended to be less self-assured, struggling for a sense of identity. But I was struggling, too. If I’d tried the drug, I might have been one of them; since I hadn’t, I had a clear-eyed view of its effects, and the sight was not attractive.

  Early one morning I awoke with a start. Someone was in the room, rustling papers at my desk. I switched on the light that replaced my lithophane lamp—an ugly ceramic lamp I’d rescued from the recycling center.

  Bernadette was leaning over my desk.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Looking for your politics paper.” She blinked, adjusting to the light. “I’m stuck. Reading yours might help me.”

  “You want to copy my paper?”

  “Just a little bit.” She smiled at me.

  I slid out of bed and went to the desk. “You have no right to go through my things.”

  “Whatever.” She yawned again and went back to her bed.

  “And stop taking my clothes.” I tried to keep the anger out of my voice, but it came through. “You already took Walker. Isn’t that enough?”

  She pulled blankets up to her chin. “You don’t have to be so uppity about it. Anyway, I didn’t take Walker. You can sleep with him, too, anytime.”

  I gave up.

  I stacked the papers on my desk and left the room with them and a blanket in my arms. Tomorrow I’d lock them in a suitcase. Better yet, maybe I’d find a new roommate.

  Jacey found me sleeping in the lounge the next morning. When I told her what happened, she said I should hide my work in her room. “You can move in with me, if you want,” she said.

  Later that day, I moved my things into Jacey’s room.

  Once I turned in my papers and classes ended, some of the pressure decreased. Still ahead were exams in philosophy and literature, but I didn’t need to prepare for them. I knew the material already.

  Now I had time to catch up with laundry, talk to Dashay on the phone, and even, one Friday afternoon, collect my mail—something I rarely bothered to do, since no one wrote to me. The wall of metal mailboxes was in the student center basement, near the cafeteria. I turned the combination lock. Under some fliers advertising events long passed, I found a small blue envelope, with my name and address written in sharp strokes of black ink.

  A small blue card inside was engraved with the initials NC in indigo blue. The handwriting read: “I’m going sailing this Saturday. If you’d like to come along, call the number below. A car will pick you up and bring you out to St. Simon’s, where I keep the boat. Hope you can make it. Neil.”

  I’d never been sailing, or to St. Simon’s Island—part of a chain of islands off the Georgia coast that included Tybee. What would I wear? I didn’t know how to handle a rudder or tie special knots. What if I made a fool of myself? My head filled with anxious thoughts and questions, along with the certainty that no matter what, I was going to see Cameron again.

  Jacey wasn’t in the dorm room, so I took my cell phone from my backpack and called the number on the card. After two rings, a woman’s voice said, “You’ve reached voice mail for the home of Neil Cameron. Please leave a message after the tone.”

  I left my name and number, and hung up. Then I went to the closet and looked at my options. I looked best in the blue silk dress, but one didn’t wear dresses to go sailing, did one? Jeans and a T-shirt weren’t special enough. He’d already seen my trouser suit, but perhaps he wouldn’t remember it—

  My cell phone played the familiar notes from Swan Lake, and I grabbed it. “Hello?”

  A man’s voice said he was returning my call. It wasn’t Cameron’s.

  “I was responding to Neil Cameron’s invitation to go sailing,” I said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “He sent me a note,” I said. “He told me to call this number if I wanted to go sailing tomorrow.”

  “Neil’s in DC.” I heard static and noise that sounded like papers rustling. “Wait a sec. That invitation was for last weekend, when he was out at St. Simon’s. Looks like you missed the boat.”

  Mortified is a word I rarely use, because it means “gangrenous” as well as “embarrassed.” But that day, I said, “I’m mortified,” without reservation.

  “Don’t be,” the voice said. “I’ll tell Neil you called.”

  When Jacey came back late that afternoon and found me lying in bed, fully clothed, staring at the ceiling, she said, “Oh, rocks. Did you fail an exam?”

  “I missed the chance to do something really special,” I said.

  She grinned. “Is that all?”

  I quoted the Whittier line: “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’” I threw my arm over my eyes so that I couldn’t see her laughing.

  Then I quoted Longfellow: “Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, /Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness; /So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, /Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.”

  “Ari, stop.” Her voice was serious now. “That’s too depressing.”

  “So is my life.” I wallowed in the deep pink pleasure of self-pity.

  “Now you sound like Bernadette,” she said.

  That was enough to make me sit up.

  “Come on,” she said. “Grab a sweater. I’ve got just the remedy for y
ou. We’re going to All-Mart.”

  I’d never been to an All-Mart, and I had no desire to go. “Aren’t we supposed to boycott places like that?”

  “Yes!” she said. “They mistreat the environment. They exploit workers. But we’re not going to buy anything. We’re going to take notes!”

  I didn’t move. “I didn’t think they had All-Marts around here.”

  “There’s one near Waycross.”

  Waycross was at least forty-five miles away, near the entrance to the Okefenokee Swamp.

  “I’ll drive,” Jacey said. “It will be fun. A real road trip!”

  I supposed I had nothing better to do.

  In her car, Jacey told me about the minicourse she was taking called Corporate Ethics. “It’s kind of theoretical,” she said. “For my final paper, I want to make it real. If we’re lucky, we’ll see some All-Mart abuse in action.”

  Her car was old and battered looking. I wished it were mine.

  We passed gas stations and vacant lots for sale, a Baptist church, a sign that read PRENATAL CARE CEMETERY, and several roadside shrines featuring crosses that bore the names of highway accident victims. Most of the shrines were festooned with artificial flowers and wreaths, and one was attached to four helium-filled balloons. We rode on concrete bridges over brown rivers. The marquee of a used car lot read GIVE GOD THE GLORY.

  I clutched my cell phone, willing it to ring. When it didn’t, I reminded myself that service was spotty in this part of southeastern Georgia.

  Jacey sat on two cushions to let her see past the steering wheel. She talked most of the way.

  “Tonight we get a full moon,” she said.

  “Then it must be a blue moon.” The moon had been full early this month, when I’d first been to Tybee Island.

  “Really? What shade of blue?” Jacey’s enthusiasm never annoyed me. It was refreshingly genuine, in contrast with the attitudes of most Hillhouse students.

  “Not literally blue,” I said. “It’s a term for the second full moon within a month.”

  “We heard about blue moons last year in my folklore class.” Jacey pulled into the All-Mart parking lot. “That’s when the moon talks to people who’ve been unlucky in love.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  She parked the car and we got out. “I’d like to believe it. I’d like to hear what it would say to me.”

  I realized that never once had I seen Jacey with a boyfriend—or girlfriend, for that matter. I’d been so wrapped up in myself that I never wondered if she was happy.

  “Thanks for driving,” I was saying, when I noticed the van: beige, Chevrolet, bald man at the wheel. I felt the words freeze as I spoke them. I saw only the back of the driver’s head, but it looked like Sal Valentine’s. I wondered if he’d followed us.

  The van had parked along the curb outside the store entrance. A girl smoking a cigarette leaned against the passenger door, talking to the driver inside.

  As we approached the store, I told Jacey to go in without me. “I’ll catch up in a minute,” I said.

  She looked surprised, but she kept walking.

  I came closer to the van. “Excuse me,” I said, loud enough to make other shoppers turn around.

  The girl turned. She had short red hair, and she looked about fifteen.

  “Get away from here.” I pitched my voice lower now, but I made each word as emphatic as I could. “This guy is trouble. He abducts girls. He killed a friend of mine. Get away now.”

  She didn’t move. She didn’t even blink. She took a drag on the cigarette, and that’s when I noticed her eyes. They looked lifeless as a store mannequin’s.

  It was too late. She’d already been recruited.

  I felt Sal’s eyes fix on me, felt their heat reach my face. I turned and ran into All-Mart.

  The place smelled of burnt popcorn and overcooked frankfurters. The shoppers moved in slow shuffles, pushing carts, some carts with babies in them. Most of the babies were crying, and their din blended with music blared from overhead speakers.

  At first I didn’t see Jacey; she wasn’t easy to find in a crowd. Then I spotted her leaning against a jewelry counter, taking notes. With her long hair in braids and her plaid shirt and denim overalls, she looked like a child, if you didn’t notice the notebook and pen in her hands. They made her seem older, somehow.

  I headed toward her, but before I reached the counter, I looked back, over my shoulder. The girl with red hair was coming after me.

  She seemed to be in no hurry. She smoked as she walked. Some part of me thought, Isn’t smoking illegal in stores?

  I changed course, headed down an aisle past greeting cards and craft supplies. The store spread out in all directions, and I didn’t see any place that wasn’t brightly lit and fully exposed. The speakers in the ceiling played an instrumental song that I recognized from a music box my mother owned. The song was called “Stardust.”

  The girl with red hair rounded the corner, past racks of yarn and plastic packages of knitting needles. She seemed to be moving faster now.

  I wove between shoppers, turned into the appliance section, accidentally shoved a large woman reaching for a toaster oven.

  “Hey!” Her voice echoed after me.

  The aisles were numbered on signs suspended from the ceiling, but I didn’t have time to look up. Then I found myself back at the jewelry counter, Jacey still leaning against it, writing in her notebook.

  “There you are,” she said.

  I grabbed her arm and tugged her toward the entrance. “Jacey, go home,” I said. “Get out of here. Don’t talk to anybody. Don’t wait for me.”

  “What?” She lurched along with me, her pen in one hand, notebook in the other. “What are you doing?”

  She didn’t weigh much, and she was easy to drag.

  “Remember what happened to my friend Autumn?” I said. “Bernie was right—people around me get killed. Get out of here now. Don’t look at anyone in the parking lot. Just go.”

  She kept trying to interrupt me. Then her eyes grew wide. She’d seen something. I whirled around. The girl with the cigarette stood in front of us, her face without expression. She blew smoke into my face.

  Jacey pulled free of my grasp and bolted out of the store. I held my ground. “What do you want with me?” I said.

  Beneath her cap of red hair, her eyes never blinked. She inhaled deeply and exhaled toward my eyes. I coughed and looked around for help.

  The store greeter, an older man with a potbelly, stood by the line of shopping carts. I called to him: “Sir, please—”

  Then she lunged at me, holding the cigarette lit-end outward. It singed the hair on my arm. On her second attempt, the cigarette reached my skin.

  The pain made me flinch, shrink back. I heard myself say something incoherent. Then I turned and wove back through the crowd again, past jewelry, past appliances, past sewing supplies, and into women’s fashions. That’s where I decided to turn invisible.

  I wasn’t wearing my special suit, but when I passed the T-shirts and jeans pinned to a display board, I saw a chance. I kicked my backpack beneath the wooden pedestal where the board was mounted, climbed onto it, and stretched out my arms. Like a scarecrow, I thought. Now, instead of three outfits on display, there were four—the last a little grungier than the rest, accessorized by an amulet in the shape of a cat.

  She walked by the display a few seconds later, looking from side to side, scanning like an automaton, holding the cigarette’s red end outward, ready to strike. She passed so close to me that I smelled the lotion she wore: a mixture of pineapple and coconut cream. I tried not to inhale, in case it was toxic. I looked down at her, wishing I was someone else, someone capable of fighting back.

  All-Mart stays open late on Saturdays. At ten fifty P.M. the loudspeaker announced that the store was about to close.

  For more than two hours I’d held my invisible mannequin pose. My neck and arms ached. One foot had gone to sleep, and the cigarette burn o
n my forearm throbbed and stung. I’d heard more instrumental versions of popular songs from the 1970s and ’80s than I can bear to recall; for years afterward, I couldn’t stand to listen to that music. Chemically engineered scents worn by shoppers and store clerks mixed with the stench of burnt popcorn, making me light-headed, close to nauseous.

  My eyes felt heavy, and I may have briefly dozed. What woke me up was the sight of a dark-haired man pushing a cart filled with junk food. I could have sworn he was Elvis—the Darling of the Chemistry Department, the Once and Future King. He passed me, mumbling to himself, and disappeared down another aisle.

  Earlier I’d wondered if I should spend the night in the place. But even if ten cigarette girls and shadow men were waiting, I had to get out. As I turned visible again, I hoped that no one was monitoring the security cameras too closely that night.

  Outside, the parking lot gaped, nearly empty. No van. No Jacey’s car, either—which came as a big relief. If Sal had grabbed her, I thought, her car would still be there.

  It would be a long walk back to campus. My cell phone didn’t work. Jacey had been right—the moon was full, rising over the flat landscape like a searchlight beam. I thought about taking off my clothes and turning invisible again, but the air was cold enough to persuade me otherwise. I walked along the road’s shoulder, not bothering to look for beige vans. Let them come for me, I thought.

  When I saw the sign ahead for the Okefenokee Swamp Park, it seemed as good a place as any to spend the night.

  The park was closed, but the fence was easy to scale. Tupelo trees glistened silver in the moonlight, and the shallow water beneath them seemed bottomless. I made my way to the docks where we’d launched our canoes.

  I’d had some vague idea about borrowing a boat and paddling out to the island where the cabin was. But I felt too tired to go a step farther. I wrapped my sweater around me and lay on a bench attached to the dock. There was no sign of Old Joe, and I said a silent prayer that somewhere, he was well—that somewhere he was, at least, alive.