The Year of Disappearances (3 page)

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.

A
fter 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, glasses 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.

“It’s an acquired taste,” I said. A few of the regulars smiled at me.

“You girls don’t want to be hanging around a dump like this,” Logan said. “You’d be more at home over at Murray’s.”

Without another word they left the bar, Autumn throwing me a look of contempt as they went.

Logan said something under his breath, and everyone close to the bar laughed.

“I always thought there was alcohol in Picardo,” I said. “There is.” Dashay took a long sip from her glass. “Plenty.”

My mother took Logan to task for lying to Mysty and Autumn. “You could lose your license for giving them Picardo,” she said, leaning her elbows on the bar.

Logan poured us another round. He grinned at Mãe. “I know. But the girl wanted a taste. Now she knows what bitter is.”

I wondered why we could drink so much Picardo and never get drunk. Mãe and Logan both began to speak at once: “Because we’re not—” They laughed. Mãe finished the sentence: “—susceptible to alcohol.”

I helped her carry the glasses back to our booth.

“Watch out for those girls,” Dashay said as we sat down. “They gave me a bad feeling.” Abruptly she stretched her hands toward me. “Let me look at your eyes.”

She pushed my forehead back and leaned in close to cup my chin. I stared into her eyes: caramel brown from a distance, but flecked with orange and green and black and yellow, I saw now. It felt odd to look into them so closely.

After several seconds, she pulled away. “No, you’re all right.”

“What was that about?” I asked her.

She didn’t answer. She stared off into the distance.

“Her mind is elsewhere,” Mãe said, her voice gentle. “Let her be.”

And so we spent the rest of Unhappy Hour in silence, listening to the jukebox play a strange mix of songs that smelled of stale cigarette smoke and loneliness, each of them plaintive in its own way.

When we left the bar, I noticed a beige van parked down the road, near Murray’s Restaurant. “That looks like the van I saw yesterday,” I said.

It drove away before I could tell for sure.

Mãe and Dashay didn’t even hear me. They were each thinking about Bennett.

Later that night, when Dashay had retired to her room, I came back to the living room, sat on the sofa, and tried to tune in to her thoughts.

My rationale was simple: she was my friend; she was in trouble; and, clearly, she and my mother weren’t ready to tell me what had happened in Jamaica. I couldn’t stand being left out any longer.

Mãe glided into the room, wearing a white silk robe that shimmered as she moved. She took one look at me and knew exactly what I’d been doing. “You did hear what I said about eavesdropping?” She spoke in a fierce whisper. “It’s a bad thing—”

I said quickly, “Father always said that there are few if any moral absolutes.” I was suddenly reminded of how much he disliked people who interrupted others.
The art of conversation in America is utterly dead,
he’d said once. “Excuse me for interrupting,” I added.

“And so how would you justify eavesdropping?” She sat in the armchair facing me.

“Well, the infringement of her privacy is outweighed by the possible benefit,” I said, thinking as I spoke, hoping it sounded plausible. “I love Dashay. And I might be able to help her.”

“I don’t think you’re being logical,” my mother said slowly.

“You let me listen to your thoughts. What’s so bad about eavesdropping?”

“I let you listen sometimes,” she said, and proved it by blocking them; it’s easy to do that, if you’re one of us, though I often don’t remember to make the effort. “I’m not an ethical
expert
like you and your father, but in my opinion it’s not fair to eavesdrop or listen to the thoughts of someone who’s upset. It’s meddling, pure and simple, and meddling is wrong.”

I folded my arms across my chest. “Even if you think you can help them?” It was the first time I’d talked back to my mother, and I found it exciting. I wondered if I’d have had the nerve if the room wasn’t so dark.

Suddenly Dashay swept into the room. “Let it
go,
Ari,” she said.

But I had what I thought was the last word: “Dashay, you must have been eavesdropping.”

Sassy girl,
Mãe thought. And Dashay thought,
Just like her mother.

In spite of what I’d said, I knew that Mãe was right: listening to others’ thoughts was an intrusion, warranted only in exceptional circumstances. The trouble was, so many circumstances felt exceptional, that year.

In the end, I didn’t have to eavesdrop to hear the story. Dashay told me herself, a few days later.

Bennett had never wanted to go to Jamaica, she said. Dashay hadn’t been home for years—she left soon after her parents died in an accident—and the funeral of a grandmother didn’t strike him as the right occasion to meet her family. But Dashay cajoled him into going. (Bennett was easy to cajole—he was the sort of man who danced through life, laughing easily, making women want to flirt.)

From the first night, things didn’t go well. For starters, Dashay’s family had no idea that they were entertaining vampires. Dashay had grown up an ordinary mortal, but when she left home she was “vamped” (her word) in Miami—a city popular with the more vicious sorts of vampires. (Bennett was an
other,
too—but how that happened is another story entirely.)

In any case, Dashay’s family was a suspicious bunch, and her auntie was the worst. She wanted to know what was in the blood-colored flakes Dashay and Bennett sprinkled onto their food. She wanted to know why Dashay “didn’t smell right”—of course, vampires have no smell.

Auntie had always blamed Dashay for leaving Jamaica when her parents died, for not waiting until their souls were truly at rest. When someone dies, it’s thought that her spirit, or “duppy,” wanders for several days. There are special rituals to make sure the duppy is laid to rest.

One night Auntie saw Dashay and her cousin Calvin under a cotton tree. Dashay held Calvin’s chin in her hand, staring deep into his eyes. Auntie got it into her head that Dashay was a witch, putting a spell on her son. So Auntie went off into the hills above Montego Bay to see the obeah man—a sort of shaman who links the spirit world with this one. The obeah man listened to Auntie ranting about her niece, the witch, and he laughed at her.

Auntie came back home in a furious mood. She said to the assembled family members, “He tell me, what sort of woman are you, worrying about witches when you have vampires sleeping in your house?”

Dashay was speechless. And Bennett wasn’t there to defend her. Later, she wondered if maybe he’d seen Dashay and Calvin together that night. Maybe he got the wrong idea.

“Duppy get the blame, but man feel the pain.” Dashay repeated the phrase. “When things go wrong, Auntie always puts the blame on duppies, or on me.”

Dashay ran out of the house to look for Bennett, but she couldn’t find him. “The love of my life,” she said, her voice low. “Just like that, he was gone.” She blew across her palm, scattering imaginary dandelion fluff. Then she began to cry again.

That August I spent several more days helping Leon; we moved onto the roof, nailing strips of shingles into place, then came back down to staple stripping around the openings for doors and windows.

Once I looked up from my work and found Dashay face to face with Leon, her eyes inches away from his. I stopped, not knowing what to do.

“She’s making sure he’s all right.” My mother’s voice came from behind me. “She thinks that she can tell someone’s condition from their eyes.”

Apparently Leon passed muster. Dashay said something to him, then abruptly walked away. He looked baffled.

“Your friend is one strange lady,” he said to me later. “She said she was checking out my ‘sasa.’ What does that mean?”

I couldn’t help him. He was hoping it meant “sex appeal.”

That night at dinner I told Dashay what he’d said. But she didn’t laugh. “He has a small one, right near his liver,” she said, her voice low, close to a whisper. “Not big enough to worry about, just yet. I tell him if he won’t drink so much, the thing should leave him.”

“A small
what
?”

“A small sasa,” she said. She pronounced it “
sah
sah.”

“Like in Homo
sassa
?” My vowels sounded harsher than hers.