The Year of Disappearances

by Hubbard, Susan

  I nodded. What else could I do?

  We drove through Savannah, past houses ornate as wedding cakes along Victory Drive, and out onto the Islands Parkway. Still no beige vans. My mother said she’d barely had time to get my father settled into the rental house when Dashay called her, telling her that Burton wanted to interview me.

  “We arranged for Dashay to drive up and look after Raphael,” she said. “And I came down to meet you.” Mãe said that Dashay had found a doctor in Savannah who was one of us. The doctor had examined my father and was running tests.

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “We don’t know yet,” Mãe said.

  Now we were driving on a two-lane road with marshlands and water on either side. I rolled down the window to smell the salt in the breeze. The main town of Tybee Island was touristy, lined with lurid signs and shabby souvenir shops. My mother said it had been different when she summered there as a child. She and my father first met on the beach when they were children. “All of that seems to have happened a million years ago,” she said now.

  She turned the car into a small street that dead-ended at the beach and parked the truck. After we got out, she rested her hands on my shoulders. “Remember what I told you,” she said. “He doesn’t look the way you remember him.”

  That’s when I began to truly be afraid.

  Mãe led me down a gravel path to a house on stilts that faced the beach. I heard the low hiss of the ocean not far away. We climbed a somewhat rickety set of steps that led to a dark green door.

  Dashay opened the door, talking into a cell phone—a surprise, since she and my mother had never used one, in my experience. “Okay,” she said. “I get it. Thank you, Dr. Cho. See you soon.” She clicked off the phone and hugged each of us as we came into the house.

  I didn’t notice anything in the room, except the absence of my father. “Where is he?”

  “He’s in bed.” Dashay gestured to the left. “Wait,” she said, but I was already moving.

  The windows of the room were open, and the noise of the ocean was louder now. A figure lay beneath a quilt on the double bed, dark hair against a pillow, face turned toward the wall. Next to the bed, an IV pole held two bags, one of clear fluid, one of red. The red one had a tube attached to it that ran under the quilt.

  “Father?” I said.

  Behind me, Dashay said, “Did you tell her?” and Mãe said, “Yes.”

  “Father?” I walked closer. He didn’t move. I bent over him to see his face, and when I saw it, a wave of vertigo hit me. Someone grabbed me, pulled me backward.

  His eyes were half-open, but he didn’t seem to see me. His face looked shrunken, shriveled, the skin tight across the bones. He reminded me of Old Joe, lying stiff and still, getting ready to die.

  When Dr. Cho arrived that afternoon, I’d recovered enough to frame a dozen questions. What caused my father’s condition? What were his chances of survival? I practiced the questions on my mother and Dashay, who didn’t have any answers.

  Dr. Cho was a tiny woman with long black hair held back by a clip and a serene, oval face. She didn’t mince words. “Severe hemolytic anemia,” she said. “His red blood cells are breaking down faster than his body can replace them. There’s a growing risk of heart failure.”

  I said, “Is he going to die?”

  “He needs a massive transfusion.” Her voice was crisp. “The sooner we begin, the better his chances.”

  Dr. Cho had brought plastic bags of blood with her; as she lifted them out of a portable cooler, they glowed in the afternoon sunlight, their color between maroon and burgundy. She put them in the refrigerator, except for one that she carried into the bedroom.

  Mãe, Dashay, and I offered to help, but she said that would come later. We sat at the kitchen table while she worked. There wasn’t a sound in the place except for the ocean.

  Suddenly I said, “Is he in pain?”

  Mãe and Dashay looked at each other. Dashay said, “We don’t know. He stopped talking days ago, and his thoughts aren’t making much sense.”

  We sat silently at the table. Dr. Cho came in after an hour or so and switched on the overhead light. “What, is this a funeral?” she said. “Go take a walk on the beach.”

  “How is he?” Mãe’s voice sounded scratchy.

  “He’s very sick. You know that. His heart rate isn’t regular, and I’m going to put him on a respirator tomorrow if his breathing doesn’t improve. Now get outside, look at the moon. Then we need to eat some dinner, please.” For a small person, her voice carried enormous authority.

  We shuffled out of the room, down the steps, and along the path to a ramp that led to the beach. The darkness and the sounds of the ocean swelled around us. The moon was full that night, but we couldn’t see it because of cloud cover, and I was glad. I let my face lose its stoic expression, and I felt it contort. Grief felt close to rage, that night, and I didn’t want the others to see what I felt.

  He can’t die, I thought. He’s a vampire. Vampires don’t die.

  That night, I wanted all the myths to be true. And for the first time in my life, I wanted to pray.

  The song of my cell phone sounded so inappropriate. I sensed Mãe and Dashay flinch at the sound of Swan Lake.

  The last voice I expected to hear was Walker’s. He said he was at home in North Carolina. Then he asked where I was, and I told him. I told him my father was sick, and he said he was sorry. He asked if he could come to help, and when I told him no, he sounded disappointed.

  “After break, I’m going to take you on a picnic,” he said.

  I couldn’t imagine it. “That sounds nice,” I said.

  “We’ll eat strawberries, and I’ll show you the new tricks I’ve learned,” he said. “When are you coming back?”

  “I’m not sure yet.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I might not be coming back at all.

  He said, “Ari, I can change a stone into a flower.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  At some point in the middle of that long night, I awoke, not sure where I was. What oriented me were the smell of the ocean and the odor of blood.

  Mortals often say that blood smells metallic. To me it smells like ozone with a hint of copper, and its smell is dark blue.

  I pushed myself out of bed and through the blue-tinged air into the kitchen. A night-light burned above the stove. Dr. Cho sat at the table, eating a bowl of the shrimp gumbo Dashay had served earlier that night. For someone who couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds, Dr. Cho had an impressive appetite. She’d consumed three bowls of gumbo at dinner. The rest of us ate very little.

  She set down her spoon. “Can’t sleep?”

  I sat in the chair across from hers. “How long will the transfusion take?”

  “It will be over by morning. We’re transfusing his entire blood system, and it takes a while.”

  “Will he be okay then?”

  “I don’t know. If you’re asking if he’ll be able to talk, I doubt it.” She picked up her spoon again. “It will take some time before we know if he’s going to be okay.”

  “What made him sick?”

  “I don’t know,” she said again. “His condition is unusual, but not entirely unprecedented. His immune system has been compromised. It’s clear that he hasn’t been taking supplements or eating properly.” She took a large mouthful of gumbo.

  I didn’t know how she could eat when, in the room next door, my father was barely alive.

  She smiled, as if she’d heard what I thought. “You can go look in on him if you want.”

  I wanted to, yet I dreaded the sight of him. So I sat and watched her eat. She finished the bowl with a small sigh of contentment. “That Dashay is some good cook.”

  “Are you a doctor for vampires only?” I asked.

  She took the bowl to the sink and rinsed it. “I treat anyone and everyone,” she said, coming back to the table. “But I don’t normally make house calls. Your mother said Raph
ael hates hospitals, and I was glad to make an exception for him. You know, I met him, many years ago at a conference. He was quite the dashing young man. Even I fancied him, but don’t tell your mother that.”

  My instinctive reaction—He’s ours, not yours—didn’t escape her attention. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m happily married now.”

  I’d never met a married vampire—unless I counted my mother, and I wasn’t sure I could.

  “Are you married to one of us?” Immediately I regretted asking such a personal question.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “Yes, I am. My partner and I have been together nine years.”

  “Did you ever think about marrying a mortal?”

  “No.” She stretched her hands on the wooden table. Although small, they looked strong. “Mortals are for dating, maybe for a fling. But marrying one? Too many problems!” Then she paused, flexed her hands. “Why do you ask? Are you considering it?”

  “No, I just wondered.” I blocked my thoughts.

  “There are options, you know. This new drug protocol they’re testing, what’s it called? Revité? It’s in clinical trials now, but there’s already a lot of talk about it in the Vunderworld pages on the Internet.”

  “What does it do?”

  “Allegedly it makes vampires mortal again.” She stood up and stretched her arms. “Does that option appeal to you?”

  I couldn’t answer. The very idea of such a drug was dazzling, terrifying.

  “Now I need to go to Raphael,” Dr. Cho said.

  Long after she left the room, I sat at the oak table in the dim light, tracing its whorls with my fingertips.

  When I was twelve, my father and I had read the Bardo Thodol, known as the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It’s a guide to dying. The book includes chants and rituals to help the deceased come face to face with the Clear Light and experience the visions that ultimately lead to rebirth.

  But he and I had never had the time to talk about confronting our own deaths. We’d assumed that, like most vampires, we’d be around forever, provided we took care of ourselves. As a biomedical researcher, my father knew more than most about monitoring one’s diet and exposure to sunlight. I’d thought he had it down to an exact science.

  So what went wrong? As I sat there, it came clear to me: his condition was my fault. If I hadn’t told him about seeing the shadow man, he wouldn’t have set off in pursuit, or let himself get sick. Now I didn’t know the right words to chant, or even whether he’d want them said.

  At daybreak Dashay came into the kitchen, wearing a pale yellow caftan, yawning. She bent over me, looked at me hard. “You should have stayed in bed,” she said. “It’s all right. Death is not in this house.”

  My shoulders untensed, and I sat back in my chair.

  While Dashay brewed tea, she told me the story of “that snake Bennett.” “He’s living in Atlanta with a woman he met on the plane,” she said, inflecting plane as if it meant sewer.

  “How did you track him down?”

  “Cecil helped.” Her smile mixed self-satisfaction with unease. “He’s been very useful.”

  Thinking of her with Cecil made me uncomfortable. “So you went to Atlanta,” I said.

  “Yes, I did make the trip. And that is one city I have never much cared for. It grew too big way too fast. Every time I go there, I ask myself why I bothered. But I wanted to see that snake with my own eyes. Cecil told me the address. I got there around five o’clock last Thursday, and Bennett, he answered the door himself—a little apartment in a brown building, nasty—and there behind him stood this woman, waiting. Ari, let me tell you, this woman I can almost feel sorry for. She’s not pretty, she’s not ugly. She’s just a woman he met on the plane.”

  “Um, he met her on the rebound?” That was a phrase I’d learned from reading magazines.

  “On the plane, he met her.” Dashay’s voice was so loud and so loaded with indignation that I wanted to shush her, fearful that she’d disturb my father. Then I wondered, could he be disturbed? Was he even conscious?

  “Bennett, he took two steps back when he saw me, and that woman came two steps forward. ‘We have nothing to say to you.’” Dashay imitated the woman’s voice, high-pitched and squeaky as the voice of a cartoon mouse.

  “‘But I have something to say to Bennett,’ I told her. And I told him, ‘I want to know why you left me.’”

  “What did he say?”

  “Not one word. He stood there. He had no expression on his face, and when I looked at him, his eyes went right through me. Then that woman shut the door.” Dashay poured two cups of tea, spilling some into the saucers. “It’s like she put a spell on him.”

  We sipped our tea, and the sun turned the kitchen walls red, then golden. “I know I must have scared him, back in Jamaica, maybe even before that,” Dashay said. “All I wanted was to ask him why.”

  Dr. Cho opened the door of my father’s room and came to the table. “Do I smell Earl Grey?”

  Dashay poured her a cup, but she didn’t take it at once. “Come and see,” she said to me.

  From her voice I knew things must be better, but still I hesitated. Then she took my hand and led me into the bedroom.

  He lay on his back, his left arm connected to the IV tube, his chest connected by wires to a heart monitor. His eyes were closed, his face gaunt. I didn’t want to look.

  “See the color in his face?” Dr. Cho whispered.

  And it was true—his skin had lost the waxy quality it had the day before. But it still looked yellowish, and it still clung too tightly to his bones.

  Then I saw the figure asleep in the chair at the foot of the bed. Mãe was curled into a semicircle, half-covered by an afghan, her long hair hiding her face. Seeing her there strengthened me, somehow.

  I looked back at my father. His breathing was even, his hands lay unclenched at his sides. What had I expected—a complete recovery?

  I spent my first spring break mostly reading, or walking on the beach with Dashay, eating her spicy cooking, and from time to time looking in on my father, whose illness made me too anxious to linger long.

  Dr. Cho came and went, but Mãe stayed near him. She read to him—essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson, mostly—even though we weren’t sure he could hear.

  “Our strength grows out of our weakness,” she read one morning. “The indignation which arms itself with secret forces does not awaken until we are pricked and stung and sorely assailed. A great man is always willing to be little.”

  (Later, at the school library, I read the rest of the essay, and I realized it was one she’d read to me only a week ago, to try to make me sleep. In times of trouble, Emerson always consoles and inspires.)

  Dashay and I put on sunblock and headed for the shore. She was leaving the next day to drop me off at school, then go back to Sassa. This would be our last walk.

  The wide white beach at Tybee was full of kite fliers that day, the kites’ colors vivid reds and yellows and greens against a Persian-blue sky. Dashay and I wore UVB-blocking sunglasses, but the intensity of the colors registered nonetheless. We had to be careful not to stay out too long, because the colors could overwhelm us, make us sick.

  “I’m not cut out to be a doctor,” I said.

  “No one said you have to be a doctor.” Dashay tied her sunhat more securely beneath her chin.

  “I don’t like being around sickness.” It felt good to say that. I wouldn’t have dared, back at the cottage.

  Above us the kites soared and dipped, hovered and fell, their ribbonlike tails leaving wakes.

  “Dashay, do you think he’s going to get better?”

  Dashay had tipped back her head to watch the kites. “I think everything that can be done for him is being done,” she said. “The one I’m worried about is your mother. Nobody’s making sure she eats and sleeps.”

  We turned and headed back. As we walked, I found myself telling Dashay about the night in the swamp with Jacey, hearing the thing outside circle our t
ent. She listened closely, and when I finished, she said, “Rollin calf.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a kind of duppy, you know. A spirit who takes on the form of an animal. Sometimes an obeah man will summon the spirit from the graveyard, make it do his bidding. Other times, the rollin calf settles in at the roots of trees, waiting for some unlucky fool to come along. When he moves, you hear the chain around his neck.”

  A few weeks ago I would have dismissed the rollin calf as a legend or superstition. But now I was prepared to believe.

  “Why didn’t it harm us?”

  Dashay picked up a small shell and put it in her pocket. “Don’t know. You stayed out of his way, and maybe he wasn’t coming for you, anyway. There’s a saying in Jamaica: ‘Duppy know who to frighten and who to tell good night.’”

  We left the beach and approached the cottage. Dr. Cho’s car, a hybrid model, was parked in its driveway. As we came up the steps, my mother’s voice rang out above us: “What are you suggesting? That I tried to kill him?”

  The two women stood in the kitchen, and neither looked up when we came in. The air glowed red with their hostility.

  “The serum you gave him was tainted.” Dr. Cho’s voice was quiet, but it had an exaggerated precision to it that I’d never heard before. “I tested it. It’s loaded with quinine. Quinine can induce autoimmune hemolytic anemia.”

  Mãe looked near exhaustion. Slowly, she shook her head. “It’s the same tonic he always takes. It’s custom-mixed by his assistant—her name is Mary Ellis Root. I called her, and she brought it over on the morning I left for Georgia.”

  Dr. Cho’s eyes and mouth showed her skepticism. “She’s a well-respected hematologist,” she said. “She’d never add quinine to a blood supplement. I also found a considerable amount of antidepressant, by the way. Many sera contain some, but rarely as much as this one.” She turned to me. “Ari, could I take a sample of the tonic you’ve been using?”

  I looked at Mãe. Her eyes blazed, but she nodded, so I went to my room and brought back a prescription bottle of tonic.