I swallowed a mouthful of berries without tasting them. I said I supposed so.
“Wait,” Dashay said. “The reason we don’t go to Murray’s? It’s too bright in there. Those fluorescent lights make me batty. Plus, they don’t serve Picardo, and they have a terrible cook.”
Later, when we were alone, Mãe told me she’d driven by Bennett’s house that morning and seen a FOR SALE sign on its lawn.
“Oh, rats,” I said. We were working in the herb garden, and I stopped weeding. “Have you told Dashay?”
“Not yet.”
“You have to tell her. And it will break her heart all over again.”
“Tell her what?” Dashay leaned out of her bedroom window, her hair wrapped in a towel. Then she heard what we were thinking. We didn’t have to say a word.
My mother and Dashay made a date with Bennett’s real estate agent to see the house later that night. They pretended that they wanted to buy it.
“Why not be honest?” I asked. “Tell her that you want to find Bennett.”
Dashay refused, and Mãe agreed with her. “This is the best way,” Mãe said. “Ariella, are you packed yet?”
We were leaving for Saratoga Springs the next day.
“I need my metamaterial suit,” I said.
“No, you don’t.” She didn’t like the suit, which my father had given me in order to let me turn fully invisible. “I don’t know where it is, and in any case, we’re going to be visible on this trip.”
That meant I’d be packing jeans and T-shirts. “Whatever,” I said.
They both looked shocked. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll pack.”
Mãe said, “Don’t forget to bring a dress. We’ll go out to dinner, you know.” She liked to dress up and go to fancy restaurants.
Left on my own after dinner, I turned on my laptop and decided to try to answer some questions by myself.
It took a while, but after reading more than a hundred posts by strangers, I arrived at the definitive reason why vampires and mortals tend not to mix: lack of trust.
Vampires lie. They lie to mortals almost all the time, by hiding their identity. And they lie to each other for all sorts of reasons. When a vampire blocks her thoughts, she may be lying—or she may want you to think she’s lying, which is a more sophisticated tactic.
Of course mortals lie as well. But because we can hear their thoughts (not to mention hypnotize, scare, and bite them), we have a decisive strategic advantage.
Could vampires and humans ever really coexist in the peaceful, productive way envisioned by the Sanguinists? I began to doubt it. Could vampires lead ethical lives if they couldn’t be trusted? Weren’t honesty and trustworthiness essential to ethics?
If my father had been there, we would have talked for hours about those questions, considering an array of interpretations and implications, redefining terms, using language to link the objective, social, and subjective worlds. But he wasn’t there, and the questions remained a muddle to me.
When my cell phone rang, I was happy to stop thinking. Mysty’s voice, breathier and higher-pitched than mine, informed me that she had a date tonight with Jesse.
I knew she wanted my approval. “That’s good,” I said. “Really good. Great.”
“We’re going down to the dock to, um, stargaze.”
“It’s a good night for it,” I said. “A full moon, and Mars will be rising in the east.”
She giggled, as if stargaze meant something else. In terms of talking to a friend, I was out of practice.
“I’ll be sure to ask Jesse about Mars,” she said. “I hope the bugs aren’t bad. Mosquitoes love me.”
I thought about recommending herbs that repel mosquitoes. My mother grew some. Then I realized that she didn’t want advice. She wanted sympathy.
Have you ever analyzed human conversation? Most of it lacks purpose in the sense of accomplishing a task or seeking information. Most of it attempts to establish a personal relationship based on mutual agreement. I knew this from conversations with my friend Kathleen, who, for a while, had called me almost every night.
“Mosquitoes,” I said now. “Yuck.” Mosquitoes don’t bother vampires. I guess our blood isn’t to their taste.
“I hate mosquitoes.” Mysty’s voice had a faint Southern drawl, softer than Autumn’s Florida accent. “I hate birds, too.”
“Why do you hate birds?”
“I’m afraid of them. They have such mean little faces.” Mysty made a funny sound, a kind of guttural chirp, like the noise cats make when they’re unsettled. “They look like they want to peck out your eyes.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say.
“What are you afraid of?” she asked me.
“Being left out.” I said it without thinking.
“Oh, don’t you worry about that.” She sounded amused. “I’ll make sure you’re part of all our parties. And when we start school again, I’ll introduce you around.”
“I don’t think I’m going to school,” I said. It hadn’t even been discussed.
But I don’t think she heard me. “Do you think Jesse likes skirts better or tight jeans?” she said.
Our phone call meandered for another hour. My ear hurt. I said that I needed to go, and then came ten minutes more of Mysty saying, “Okay. Bye. Wait,” and launching into new conversational threads that wove around, looped back, and veered off again. I pictured our conversation as an enormous spiderweb, knotted and hitched and so convoluted that it made my head ache.
When we finally did say good-bye, I stood up and walked around the house for a while to clear my brain. Then I took my new telescope out onto the lawn.
It was an eight-inch reflecting scope that weighed fifty-four pounds. My father had taught me to use it before he left for Ireland. “The purpose of a telescope is to gather light,” he said. “Homosassa is a good place to see the sky, since it’s relatively free of light pollution.”
When I looked through the eyepiece for the first time, I’d felt disappointed. All I saw was a blur of darkness and light.
“Be patient, Ari,” my father said. “You need to learn how to see. Remember when you first tried to find constellations? You couldn’t find a bear or a lion.”
I remembered. At first I could barely see the Big Dipper. Then, one night, I was suddenly able to see the same figures named by stargazers thousands of years ago—with a few exceptions. Cygnus to this day doesn’t look much like a swan to me, and Perseus doesn’t look like a man, much less a hero.
My father said, “With practice, your eye will pick up details that are invisible to you now.”
The humidity level was so high that I felt as if I were swimming as I set up the scope. It reminded me of the air before the hurricane hit—dense and hot and gusty. I wondered if another tropical depression was on its way.
Tonight was not optimal for stargazing after all. Clouds kept scudding across the sky. But intermittently I glimpsed craters and mountains on the moon, and the strange shadows the mountains cast on the plains. I repositioned the scope. I was looking for constellations when I saw a dull red glow, an enormous star, twinkling from Orion’s right shoulder. Before I could study it, it was covered by cloud.
But I remembered its location, and later I identified it as Betelgeuse: a red supergiant star more than six hundred-fifty times as large as the sun. The Web site I found said that Betelgeuse is “nearing the end of its life.”
Imagine the supernova explosion predicted for Betelgeuse. The dying star will shed its outer layers and form a cloud of glowing gas and plasma. The scientists don’t agree on the explosion’s effects on Earth. Some think we’ll be bombarded with particles and gamma rays. And they don’t agree on its timing; some think it might take place in the next thousand years or so. But they are unanimous about one thing: Betelgeuse will die. I wondered where I’d be when it happened.
Suddenly, from the outer corner of my left eye, I saw a small movement in the trees near the deck. At the same moment m
y skin began to tingle. I pulled away from the eyepiece, and then I fell backward, onto the deck’s bench, the night world around me spinning. A sense of nausea rose from deep in me, and I felt something approaching out of the dark. I put my hands on either side of my head, trying to stop the spinning. But I couldn’t make it stop, and I couldn’t make what was out there go away. Then I passed out.
When I opened my eyes again, cold air swirled around me. I sat up. I felt no dizziness, no sensation of being watched. The telescope was still there. The stars hadn’t changed position.
Have you ever been outside at night and sensed that you were not alone? Odds are, your sense was correct. The night is as full of things, seen and unseen, as the sky is full of stars.
Chapter Five
When Mãe and Dashay came home that night, Dashay walked through the living room right past me without saying anything. Her lips pressed tightly together, but nonetheless they trembled.
I lay on the sofa, wrapped in a blanket. Mãe shook her head, warning me to stay quiet. After Dashay shut her bedroom door, Mãe said, “Well, that was a mistake.”
The real estate agent had been delighted to see them at first. “She said she’d put up the sign only this morning, and she knew the house would sell fast. She offered us sweet tea.”
Ignoring the realtor, Dashay had headed straight for the bedroom, opened a closet door, and said, “His clothes are still here.”
Not, my mother observed, the most subtle tactic. And in complete disregard of the strategy they’d planned on the drive over to Bennett’s place.
“The agent said she’d never met Bennett,” Mãe said. “She listed the house after he faxed her a letter. They’ve hired professional movers to come in tomorrow to pack up his things.”
“So where is he?”
“Atlanta.” Mãe sat on the sofa and kicked off her sandals. “She didn’t tell us that straight out. She let it slip later, when I asked her about the advantages of living in the South.”
“Atlanta’s not so far.” I’d seen it on a map. That was one thing my mother had taught me: how to read maps. Before I tried to find her, I’d never thought I needed them.
Mãe laid her head against the cushions. “We asked her why the owner was selling, and she said he’d made the decision all of a sudden. She said she thought he was going to be married in Atlanta.”
I thought, Poor Dashay.
My mother tilted her head forward and opened her eyes. “At first, Dashay didn’t move. She stood there, not even blinking. Then she picked up Bennett’s globe—remember the crystal globe? She picked it up and threw it at the door.”
I did remember the globe, sitting on a pedestal in Bennett’s living room. Dashay had given it to him. It was an antique—a clear sphere with continents delicately etched across it and signs of the zodiac engraved on its base. To me, it epitomized fragility.
“Why did she have to break it?”
My mother flinched. She was recalling the graceful arc of the globe’s trajectory. Instinctively, she’d bent forward, stretched out her hands, thinking she might catch it in time. The globe flew past her fingertips.
I watched my mother stretch out her hands, look at them critically. She wasn’t accustomed to them failing her.
“Don’t you ever have moments where you find yourself doing things you’d never intended to do?” she asked. “Moments when your feelings swell up and take over?”
Yes, I’d had such moments. And she knew I had.
My mother flexed her fingers. “Sometimes, we need to break things.” Then she noticed me and the blanket. “Aren’t you feeling well?”
I told her about the dizziness, the spinning, the passing out. “Darkness was all around,” I said, unable to think of more precise words.
She said, “Sounds like vertigo. Vampires are prone to it.”
“And I felt that someone was watching me.”
Her jaw clenched tight, and her eyes darkened. “If you’re not well, we’ll postpone our trip.”
“No,” I said. “I’m fine now. And I’d really like to get away for a while.”
Next morning, Dashay insisted on driving us to the airport in Orlando.
Mãe was still ready to cancel the trip, but Dashay wouldn’t hear of it.
“You are going to get up there and bring us back some furniture,” she said. “This place needs furniture. Chairs and bookcases and all those little things, rugs and lamps and pictures. We need to make this place like a home again.”
Mãe kept glancing at Dashay, trying to figure her out. Dashay smiled at my mother—a wide, artificial smile, a parody of a real one. Her eyes were solemn.
“Stop smiling that weird smile,” Mãe said. “You win. We’ll go. But stop smiling.”
Dashay stopped smiling. We went. We drove across the rolling green terrain of Citrus County toward flat Orlando. I felt too nervous to talk. I’d never flown before.
The Orlando airport was bedlam. Hundreds of children wearing mouse hats and T-shirts, almost none of them happy, made a din unlike anything I’d heard before or since.
My mother looked lean and cool in a white suit. Most of the tourists wore T-shirts and shorts. She looked like a separate species, as indeed she was.
She leaned back in her chair, watching the chaos, her eyes serene.
“Every one of us has a story of our lives.” Mãe stretched out her legs, about to kick off her shoes, then realized where she was and kept them on. “Some of us make them up as we go. Others buy into the stories told on TV or in the movies.” She looked at an old man wearing mouse ears. “Stories help us get by. They don’t have to make sense.”
She went to check the arrival board and came back to say our plane was late. “What shall we do?” she said. “How about a dance?”
Speakers in the ceiling played classical music—an attempt to drown out the screaming children, I supposed. At the moment, a waltz was on.
“I don’t know how to dance.” I hated to confess ignorance to her, yet I seemed to do it at least once a day.
“Then I’ll teach you.”
So I had my first dance lesson at the Orlando airport, moving across the industrial carpeting in three-four time to the music of Strauss, accompanied by the shrieks of unhappy children.
On the plane, Mãe was thinking ahead, to renting the van, checking into a hotel, finding a place for dinner. She often lived in the near future, I thought. Like my father, she liked to make plans and watch them come into being. If the plans failed, she’d think ahead to new ones.
I preferred to live in the present. Everything about the plane—the uncomfortable seats, the tiny screens that showed a safety video, the attendants’ peculiar costumes—was fascinating, to me. And as the plane cruised up the Northeastern coastline, I looked down at the rivers and streams that ran into the ocean and saw them light up—first silver, then gold, then indigo—as the plane flew over them. A trick of the light? The sun was almost directly overhead. Whatever caused the phenomenon, it made the earth appear to be a living body, with rivers for veins.
“You’re feeling better.” Mãe looked over my shoulder, down at the beautiful earth. “The vertigo is gone.”
“Yes.” Yesterday’s sense of foreboding already was far behind us.
I didn’t let myself think ahead, about returning to the city where I’d been born. In the present moment, I felt alive.
From the air, upstate New York seemed a hundred shades of green, a mosaic of fern and moss and pine. If I were able to name colors, I’d create a hue called mountain green—a mixture of pine and gray asparagus, it was the predominant color of the landscape that day.
On the ground upstate New York—Saratoga Springs, at least—seemed a place trying to live in its past, trying to become what it once was.
We chose an old hotel downtown, a place I’d often ridden past on my bicycle, wondering what its rooms might be like. The wallpaper, carpeting, and furniture had “seen better days,” Mãe said, and I wondered if it was literal
ly true, if inanimate objects retained any memory or connotation of past events. Was that armchair less happy now than in the late nineteenth century, when it had been built? Yes, I thought. It must be.
I had a similar sensation the next morning, when we drove past our old house. A stately Victorian with a cupola, it had been painted gray when last I saw it, and a wisteria vine had trailed along its left side.
The vine had been chopped down and the house painted lime green with violet trim. Since then I’ve heard a term for such houses: “painted ladies.” The name described the house well. The house’s windows, once reminding me of hooded eyes, had been stripped of curtains and shades. Now they were wide open, vacant. Stone cherubs stood on either side of its brick walkway. A large wooden sign on the lawn read BETTY’S HAVEN B&B.
My mother and I said, at the same time, “Oh.”
The house emitted signals of distress—visible sparks, faintly yellow in the morning air. It didn’t like what had been done to it any more than we did.
I tried to send the house a message: Someday, you will be rescued.
Here was one thing Saratoga Springs had in common with Florida: storage units. The repositories of cast-off lives. Our unit smelled of dust and memories. It was lined with neatly stacked boxes and furniture shrouded in plastic covers.
Mãe said, “There’s more here than I’d imagined.”
In cartons marked simply “A,” I found clothes, books, old notebooks in which my handwriting looked unbearably eager, and CDs that Kathleen had given me. I didn’t want to read the notebooks or listen to the CDs, but I wasn’t ready to give them away. I sealed two boxes and loaded them into the back of the truck we’d rented. When I came back, Mãe was sitting cross-legged, a pile of green fabric in her lap, crying.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She held up the cloth, and it unfurled into a chiffon cocktail dress. “I bought this to wear when I met your father in London.”
“He mentioned that dress once,” I said. “He said it reminded him of lettuce.”
She smiled, and cried. Except for three boxes of books, photographs, and artwork, and several pieces of furniture, she was giving most of her possessions away.
The Year of Disappearances Page 6
