I heard the powerboat before I saw it. The whine of its engine shattered the peace of the place and made a great blue heron perched on a mangrove take flight.
As the boat rounded the bend, it was moving so fast I had no time to maneuver. I saw a blur of a white hull aimed straight for me.
Then I was in the water.
Mãe had told me to pull the release strap on the kayak’s skirt if I needed to get out fast, and I tried that, holding my breath underwater, vowing not to panic. The strap resisted at first, then came free.
Mãe’s voice in my head said: “Kiss the boat. Push up.”
Kissing the boat meant leaning forward, putting my hands on either side of my body so that I could straighten my legs and push up and out. I was nearly free when I felt someone grab me, twist my body, yank it hard.
Then I was breathing again, and when I opened my eyes, I saw unbearably bright shades of yellow and green. My right ankle hurt. I lifted my leg, let it float in the water.
“She’s okay!” The voice behind me sounded elated.
Someone was supporting me, dragging me away from the kayak. He wasn’t tall, but he was muscular, and he reeked of beer.
“Lay back in the water,” he said to me. He wore aviator sunglasses that hid a good part of his face, but I thought he must be seventeen or eighteen. “I’ll pull you to the boat.”
He spoke with so much authority that I didn’t correct his usage, although a stubborn voice in me was crying, It’s lie back. The shock of being capsized made me somewhat compliant.
The boat was more than twenty feet long, with the name MY DOLL painted across its stern, beneath two outboard engines. A green canopy shaded the cockpit. I was hauled aboard as if I’d been a case of beer, passed from hand to hand. I shut my eyes, suddenly dizzy. When I opened them, I was lying on the deck under the canopy, in the company of my rescuer, another boy, and my “new friends” Mysty and Autumn.
The girls looked at me with barely concealed dislike. I sent them back one of their favorite words: whatever.
But I must have not only thought it but said it, because the boys laughed. All of them, it occurred to me, were very drunk.
I didn’t know whether to feel angry or grateful. At least what had happened to the manatee hadn’t happened to me.
They insisted on taking me and the kayak home. I had misgivings, but I let them. My ankle pain was bearable, and I knew the sprain would heal rapidly; most injuries do, when you’re a vampire. The intensity of the sun did worry me. My scalp had begun to prickle, meaning I’d been overexposed.
I lay beneath the canopy and—forgive me—tuned in to their thoughts. All was not shipshape aboard My Doll. The boat didn’t belong to anyone aboard; the boys had “borrowed” it for the day from the marina where Jesse, my rescuer (and in his mind hero) worked. Jesse was Autumn’s brother. The other boy was Chip, one of his friends who’d come along to “hang out” with Autumn. The encounter with my kayak cut short their outing, and Autumn and Mysty directed their resentment entirely at me.
Feeling stronger, I sat up. “You know, this is a manatee zone,” I said. “You were speeding.”
The boys couldn’t hear me because of the engine.
Autumn said, “Give me a break. Really.” She wore a black bathing suit that made her look exotic, too sophisticated to be on My Doll.
“Manatees migrate in the summer,” Mysty said, thinking, Or is it winter? She’d been forced to watch a nature documentary in school.
“Some are still around. I saw one today.” I wanted to shout at them, but I knew it wouldn’t change anything. “Should they be driving?” I asked. “They’re pretty drunk.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.” Autumn’s voice was sharp-edged. “Big deal, they had a few beers. You’re the one who drinks that Picardo stuff. We saw it in the liquor store. That stuff is eighty proof!”
“That bartender lied to us.” Mysty looked at me as if I’d told the lie back at Flo’s Place. “Why didn’t you say something?”
“I was with my mother.” I spoke without thinking.
The words mollified her. She assumed my mother didn’t know I was drinking alcohol and that the bartender had lied to protect me. She was accustomed to complicated lies, particularly when dealing with parents.
“Your ankle still hurting?” Autumn tossed a pack of cigarettes to me. She’d stopped blaming me.
“I can’t smoke now. Almost home.” I was glad to see Mãe’s dock looming ahead.
At the last possible minute, Jesse slowed the boat. I told him where to tie up, and they lifted me and the kayak ashore.
“I’m fine,” I lied, and managed to walk a few steps. “Thanks.”
“You sure?” Jesse wanted to be a hero as long as he could.
“Very.”
“Come on!” Mysty wanted to get back to the beer party.
“We’ll call you,” Autumn said, her thoughts inscrutable as ever.
I knelt to tie the kayak to cleats on the dock, and I waited until they were gone before I hobbled up the path to the house. I hoped they wouldn’t call.
When I came in, Mãe was sitting on the sofa in the living room, her head bowed, weeping.
“What’s wrong?” I forgot all about my ankle.
She straightened and wiped her eyes with her hand. “I’m sorry, Ariella.” But after she spoke she began to cry again.
I sat next to her. Tentatively I stretched out my hand. She clasped it. Hers was damp.
“It’s everything,” she said. “Dashay. The bees. Your father.”
On her lap was an envelope addressed to her in his handwriting. “What did he write?”
“Nothing.” She wiped her eyes again. “He writes nothing about himself. It’s all about househunting and research and the colors of the Irish countryside.” She rubbed her hand on her T-shirt. “Today’s our wedding anniversary! He’s the man who says he remembers everything.”
I tried to think of words to console her. “He doesn’t like to talk about his feelings,” I said.
“I know that,” she said, “better than anyone.”
“At least he writes to you.” I’d had only two postcards from my father, postcards that anyone might have read with cursory interest—nothing like the thick envelopes of thin blue paper that came for my mother.
“He wrote to you, too.” Mãe gestured toward the envelopes on the side table. “It came yesterday, along with this one. I was so upset about the bees that I forgot to open the mail until today.”
I reached for the envelope with my name on it, surprised at how happy I felt. But I didn’t open it. I wanted to be alone for that.
Mãe nodded. Then she must have tuned in to my thoughts, because she said, “Oh no. Your ankle? I should have taught you how to roll a kayak.”
Alone in my room I tore open the envelope. It was mostly travelogue: the coast of County Kerry was stark, yet more beautiful than he’d imagined—gray outcroppings of rock against deep green fields, and ruins of castles a commonplace sight.
“History intrudes everywhere,” he wrote. Had I heard about the Skellig monastery? Monks had lived in stone huts resembling beehives on a rocky island in the Atlantic, off the Kerry coast. They’d abandoned the monastery during the twelfth century, he said. They left because of divisiveness after some of the monks became Sanguinists.
He hoped I was keeping up with my reading. Then he quoted some lines from a poem by William Butler Yeats: “O may she live like some green laurel/Rooted in one dear perpetual place.”
At the end, he wrote, “I miss you.”
It was not enough.
Mãe said I had to spend at least a day resting my ankle. Lying immobile made me grumpy. To cheer me up, she brought me magazines she’d bought at the drugstore in town.
These weren’t my preferred magazines. They focused on current events: government, politics, crime, and war. I leafed through them, growing more and more queasy and depressed. My father had called such events “ephemera,” saying that t
hey recurred cyclically. He said that to pay attention to the current phases of the cycles would produce “delusions of control, and in the end, frustration.”
I wondered if my father was correct. True, I couldn’t do much to end war or stop crime. But some part of me felt grimly pleased that I knew a little more about them.
Until now, war had been a historic term to me; historians made wars sound reasonable, understandable, even noble, with analyses of all sides of the conflicts. I looked at the photos in the magazines and thought, History is just another kind of story.
Mãe came in carrying dinner for two on a tray. (Dashay was “out,” Mãe said, her tone telling me not to ask where.)
When she’d set it down, she said, “You still look sad, Ariella.”
“I’ve been reading about politics.” I unfolded a napkin and spread it across my lap. “Father never paid any attention to them.”
“All the more reason why you should.” She handed me silverware. “If we ignore the world, we do so at our peril.”
“I guess. But I miss the old days.” The sentence sprawled across the table, a pink-tinged sentimental mess.
“So do I, at times.”
“What do you miss?” I asked.
“I miss Saratoga Springs, sometimes. Did you think I was going to say I missed my privacy here, before you came?”
“Maybe.” The thought had occurred to me more than once.
“I’m glad you’re here. It means everything.” She opened a covered dish and began spooning creamed oysters onto a bed of sautéed spinach and toast points.
“I miss my bicycle.” That thought, too, came out of nowhere. With my father, I’d almost always thought before I spoke.
“Your bike must be in storage, along with the furniture from the old house.” She handed me a plate, which I balanced on my lap.
The oysters smelled of lemon, cream, butter, and tarragon—they hinted of faraway places I’d yet to visit.
“Why don’t we go and get your bike?” she said. “We’ll need furnishings, once the house is rebuilt. Raphael said we should take what we need from the storage unit and give away the rest.”
Mãe said she’d book us a flight to Albany early in September. We’d rent a truck, go to Saratoga Springs, and drive back with our possessions. I liked the idea of seeing my hometown again, in the company of my mother.
Over dinner, we talked about my father. “You’re right—Raphael never had much of a sense of politics,” Mãe said. “Maybe because he had no sense of family, or of being connected to a group. He never knew his father. His mother died when he was born, and he was raised by an aunt.”
“Then you’d think he’d want to be around us even more,” I said. I’d barely touched the food, and Mãe’s creamed oysters were almost irresistible. “He could have stayed long enough to give us a chance.” A chance to be a family, I thought, finding the words too sentimental to speak.
Mãe heard them anyway. “But if someone grows up without that closeness, they don’t know how to experience it with others. They may be afraid of it.”
“I grew up without it.” I pushed away my plate. “Are you saying I’ll never be close to anyone?”
The words hurt her, but she tried not to show it.
She moved the plate toward me again. “If you want your ankle to heal, you should eat.”
I speared an oyster with my fork and took a bite.
“It’s easy to assign blame,” she said. “I blame myself for leaving you all those years ago, and for letting you go out alone in the kayak today. Those are legitimate blames. I know the part I played, and I know the circumstances. But to blame someone who can’t help being himself—that’s not fair.”
I sensed that she was right. But I couldn’t give up the story I’d written in my head of a family reunited, living in harmony. No, I wasn’t ready to let that story go.
It must have been close to midnight when I awoke. Often the tree frogs’ noise or the night song of courting birds or the bright moonlight was intense enough to wake me, but tonight I sensed nothing—no frogs, no birds.
And no moon hung in the night sky. Yet when I looked out at the moon garden, I saw the orange glow of a lit cigarette.
I limped into my mother’s room, then Dashay’s room. Both beds were empty.
So I went out to the garden alone. I moved silently, keeping close to the house until I drew close enough to see who was there.
Jesse sat on a wrought-iron bench, wearing shorts and a T-shirt. Without the sunglasses, he looked handsome; his features were even, and he had large, dark eyes with long lashes. But something about the way his mouth and jaw moved suggested that he felt at odds with the world, and belligerence had become his preferred way of dealing with it. He didn’t notice me until I stood right in front of him, and he didn’t seem surprised to see me. “So this is where you live,” he said, his words slurred. Clearly the beer party had been a long one.
His shoes were crushing some of the white flowers raised by Dashay’s tears. “What are you doing here?” I said. And I wondered, Where are Mãe and Dashay?
“Wanted to make sure.” He belched. “You okay.” He smiled and patted the bench next to him. “Have a seat.”
“This is private property.” I kept my voice low, but I felt furious. “You have no right to be here.”
He laughed. “Come on. Ari. Ari, you need to lighten up. Mysty and my sister said so, too.” He belched again. “Whoops. I need a drink. You got beer?”
“Go home.” I’d come close enough to read his T-shirt: THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE.
“That’s not right. Least you can give me—the dude who saved your life—is a couple beer or three.” He smiled again, trying to charm me. Then his mouth and jaw twisted back into their habitual clench.
I moved as close to him as I dared. “Look at me.” Can a drunk person be hypnotized? I wondered. That hadn’t been mentioned in the articles I’d read online.
For the record, the answer is yes. It took longer than I care to remember now—long minutes of me urging him to stare back at me, to breathe deeply, to hear only my voice, to go deeper and deeper into relaxation, until I felt the little click of engagement, the moment when he couldn’t look away, and I knew that I was in charge.
“You will go home.” I paced my voice slowly, evenly. “You will drive slowly.” I assumed that he’d come by boat, since our front gate had an alarm system. “You will not exceed the speed limit tonight. Or ever again.”
Suddenly I began to enjoy myself. “You will never come back here. You will not be able to drink beer. The taste of it will nauseate you.” I wondered how far I should go, and decided I’d gone far enough. “Go now. When you arrive home, you’ll regain your conscious state.”
And he rose obediently, turned, and headed for the dock.
I went inside, back to bed, congratulating myself on a job well done.
But not done well enough. Next morning at breakfast, Mãe and Dashay let me know that in emphatic terms.
At first they were contrite about not being home when it happened. They’d gone to Bennett’s house—Dashay first, Mãe later, looking for Dashay. Bennett had not come home.
Then they interrogated me about what I’d said to Jesse. Mãe reminded me that she didn’t approve of hypnosis in general, but given the circumstances, she could understand why I’d done it.
“The girl had to defend herself.” Dashsay looked exhausted, but she spoke vigorously. “And telling him not to speed or drink, that can only help him. Maybe save a few manatees, maybe his own life.”
I smiled. I craved their approval.
Then Mãe said, “What else did you say?”
“I told you everything.”
“You didn’t tell him that when he became conscious again, he wouldn’t remember what you’d said?”
The looks on their faces told me I had more to learn about the art of hypnosis. “They didn’t mention that in the articles I read online,” I said. Most of them had been scripts
to help someone quit smoking or lose weight—scripts designed to be remembered.
“Oh, Ariella.” My mother’s words had heavy gray bottoms like snow clouds.
I sat without moving, numbed by her worry.
After a while, Dashay said, “Maybe he won’t say anything. Maybe the alcohol will make him forget.”
But I was remembering something my father had said. “Remember that what you learn carries weight. With knowledge comes the obligation to use it justly.”
Chapter Four
Have you ever heard a good song that had the word eternity in its lyrics? I haven’t.
Since I received a portable music player from Mãe for my birthday, I’d downloaded hundreds of songs and looked up their lyrics on the Internet. When I did a search for eternity, what came up were lines such as: “I know we’ll be happy for eternity.” “We will be together for eternity.” “I’ll wait for you for all eternity.” All written by mortals, who didn’t have an inkling of what they were talking about.
I was thinking about writing my own song when my cell phone rang. Mãe had bought me the phone to “stay in touch with friends.” So far I’d used it only a few times. When it rang, I jumped.
“That Ari?” The voice was distorted, but I could tell it was Autumn’s.
“Hi,” I said.
“We’re going to the mall. You want to come?”
The alternative was helping Leon sand window frames. “Sure,” I said. I couldn’t read any emotion in her voice, and I was curious to see what sort of reception I’d get. Even if it was hostile, I figured that at least I’d know what Jesse had told them about the night I’d hypnotized him.
They showed up at the front gate an hour later. Autumn had said half an hour, so I’d been waiting awhile when the dusty brown car appeared, moving slowly up the road.
Jesse was driving. He smiled at me and waved—not what I’d expected.
Autumn sat in the front, and I slid in back next to Mysty. Jesse’s eyes met mine in the rearview mirror. “Morning, Ari. How are you doing?”
The Year of Disappearances Page 4
