The Year of Disappearances

by Hubbard, Susan

  I wish I could write that the blue moon talked to me that night. High above, it stared down silently, a blank, impervious eye. I crossed my arms and stared back, too exhausted to sleep. I thought of all the things that might be out there in the night—snakes, duppies, a rollin calf, Sal Valentine—and I sent out a thought to them all: Come and get me. This is your chance. I’m too tired to care.

  But no one, nothing, came. I heard only rustles, barks, and splashes, along with the groans of tree frogs and river frogs, communicating in a language I would never understand. The carpet of stars overhead held no discernible patterns; try as I might, I couldn’t find constellations, only stellar clutter.

  Left out—the feeling I most feared—is all I felt that night. I remembered an Emerson essay I’d read at the school library:

  Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes…. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward out of sight…. Ghostlike, we glide through nature, and should not know our place again.

  Eventually I dozed. When morning came, I shook myself awake, stood up, and stretched. My arm had stopped stinging; the burn had healed. In its place, beneath the skin, a white scar had formed in the shape of a star.

  The walk back to school took hours. About halfway there my cell phone began the chirp that signaled a message. I played that message twenty times before I reached Hillhouse.

  Ari, it said. Cameron’s voice was eloquent even through the static. I heard you missed the boat. Not to worry. There will be other, better times.

  At that time, that year, his message was enough to keep me moving, heading back to where I might belong.

  On the last day of exam week, Dashay came to collect me and my things. My first semester of college was officially over. I wouldn’t find out my grades for two weeks, but I knew I’d done well.

  All around us, parents and students hauled boxes and suitcases and trash bags to their cars and vans. I didn’t have so much; it took fewer than twenty minutes to load Mãe’s truck.

  Dashay sat behind the steering wheel, watching a student try to repack the contents of a box she’d dropped. She picked up a sweater, stared at it, and threw it back on the ground. Then she picked up the same sweater, stared at it, and put it in the box.

  “A lot of these kids are messed up,” Dashay said. “I saw boys on the stairs walking like robots.”

  “They’re taking V.” I buckled my seat belt. “Maybe when they get home, they’ll go back to normal?” I sound like Professor Hogan, I thought. “I mean, provided they stay away from dealers and Orion Springs water.”

  “Could be.” Dashay started the engine. “But watching them go through withdrawal—that won’t be a pretty sight for Mom and Dad.”

  On the drive to Tybee, Dashay told me about life back in Homosassa Springs. The horses and Grace were fine, but they missed my mother and me.

  “I miss them, too,” I said. “When are we going back?”

  “I don’t know.” Dashay drove faster than Mãe did, cutting in and out of traffic when the mood took her. “I think the plan is to stay on Tybee for a while. The weather’s just beginning to warm up, Sara said.”

  As we drove out onto the island, past the green marshes and blue inlets of the Low Country, I felt a slow surge of excitement.

  The cottage looked the same—weather battered but solid except for the stairs, which had some broken and rotting steps. Dashay knocked, then tried the door. “Locked,” she said.

  She called the cottage number on her cell phone. We heard the phone ringing beyond the door. No one answered.

  I felt my excitement die. In its place came familiar anxiety.

  Then Dashay turned away from the cottage, toward the beach. She grinned. “Look.”

  I spun around. Past the patches of sea grass and palm trees, two people walked along the shoreline: a woman with long auburn hair streaming behind her, a tall man wearing a windbreaker.

  I tore down the steps, hearing Dashay laughing behind me.

  Then I stopped short. The couple was holding hands.

  “What’s the matter?” Dashay came up to join me. “Ah, I see. You don’t want to interrupt the lovebirds.”

  “Is that what they are?”

  My father’s face was visible now, his familiar face—composed, strong, healthy again. His head tipped back to study the clouds.

  “Don’t worry, Ari,” Dashay said. “There’s room for you, too.”

  I hung back a moment longer. Then I ran across the sand to join them.

  Epilogue

  The full text of my testimony before the Council on Vampire Ethics should be available online, so I’m not including that part of the story here. Most vampires are aware of the hearings and their aftermath. The few humans who find them will no doubt dismiss them as fiction.

  In any case, the COVE investigation came too late. By the time the Council sent out a research team, there were no opiates in bottled water—at least, none in the samples tested. Orion Springs abruptly went out of business.

  As for V, the panel dismissed it as just another “street drug,” far less dangerous than crack cocaine or heroin. When investigators went to the house near Oglethorpe Square, they found it empty.

  I wasn’t surprised. Although the Council is meant to be impartial, two of its members were avowed Nebulists. One of them noticed the scar on my arm and said, “I see you’ve been marked as an interferer.”

  Across America and across the world, people continue to disappear, as do honeybees. Scientists are working on ways of limiting and preventing future colony collapse. No one, as far as I know, is researching whether the viruses involved might have been deliberately spread, and if so, who might be spreading them.

  I’ve come to think that rather than a strength, it’s the curse of vampires that humans will not believe in them. We’ve spent the better part of the last hundred years assimilating into the society of mortals, thinking that assimilation would grant us invisibility and survival.

  But full integration into American society requires agreeing, to some extent, with the social compacts that society holds dear. And I’ve reached the conclusion that, while vampires may assimilate, it’s unlikely that we can ever integrate—unless society evolves and vampires take a visible role in it.

  Meanwhile, I dedicate this book to mortals, and I leave them these questions: Are you comfortable with the values your society holds dear? When’s the last time you looked deep into your own eyes? Do you know the limitations of your vision?

  Acknowledgments

  As I wrote this book, some generous people helped address my research questions. I send thanks to Deputy Billy Kruthers of the Hillsboro County Sheriff ’s Department, Dr. George Everett, and Dr. Amy Ward. Their knowledge and insights were invaluable.

  Sheila Forsyth, Clare Hubbard, Kate Hubbard, Mary Johnson, Nancy Pate, Adam Perry, Tison Pugh, and Pat Rushin read and commented on various drafts. Mary Pat Hyland, Rick McCoy, and Sharon Wissert offered moral support. Robley Wilson read the manuscript several times and coped, as ever, with my metamorphosis into a writing zombie. I’m lucky to have you all in my life.

  Eternal thanks to Marcy Posner and Denise Roy for their expertise, friendship, and guidance. Thanks also to Rebecca Davis and Leah Wasielewski at Simon & Schuster for their wisdom and support.

  To all of the readers who’ve sent feedback to www.susanhubbard. com: you’re the best! As is Fuchsia McInerney, who designed the page, and Caethua, who provided the music for myspace.com/thesocietyofs.

  Finally, I want to commend Save the Manatee Club (www. savethemanatee.org) and the Homosassa Springs Wildlife State Park (http://www.hswsp.com) for trying to keep the real Florida from disappearing.

 

 

  g books on Archive.