The Year of Disappearances

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 literally 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.



I found boxes of toys I’d outgrown years ago—stuffed animals and picture puzzles and books. I moved them to the give-away pile. But when we finished loading the things to take home, I changed my mind. “These come, too,” I said.



Mãe knew what I was thinking: that one day I might have a child who would play with those toys. She considered it a bad idea. But she didn’t argue.



Late afternoon on the following day, we arrived at the thrift shop’s donation center. After we’d taken out all of our giveaways, I thought of one last thing I had to have. I’d untaped four of the cartons marked KITCHEN before I found it: my mother’s old cookbook. She’d written comments next to the recipes, long before I’d known her.



Mãe was tired and hungry and eager to get back to the hotel, but when she saw what I’d been looking for, her face brightened. “You can’t know how much that means to me,” she said. “It was a present from my mother.”



For me, finding the cookbook justified the entire trip.



My cell phone rang. The ring tone was an excerpt from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, which happens to be the only music in The Movie—but that’s not why I chose it. I thought the tune mournful and romantic.



It was Dashay, asking to speak to my mother without saying “Hello” or “How are you?” to me.



Mãe held the phone with the pads of her fingers, as if it were a dead fish. “Yes?” she said. Then she listened for a while.



“Yes.” My mother’s voice sounded strained. “Well, I’ll tell her. We’ll be on the road first thing tomorrow.” She said good-bye and handed me the phone. “Bad news.”



“I gathered that.”



“You may be getting a call from the county sheriff ’s office. It’s your friend,” Mãe said. “That girl Mysty. She seems to have disappeared.”



“Disappeared?” I thought of Mysty, small and doll-like. How could she be gone? Was she lost? Had she been hurt? “She called me the night before we left town. She said she and Jesse were going stargazing. And after she hung up, I took the telescope outside and did my own stargazing. That’s when I got dizzy, remember?”



“Jesse’s the one you hypnotized?” Mãe’s eyes were serious, almost cold.



“Yes.”



She wondered if I might have made him hurt her, and I reassured her. We didn’t put any of that into words. He’s an oaf, but an amiable oaf, I thought. He wouldn’t hurt her.



My mother said, “She’s probably wandered off, the way girls do sometimes. She’ll likely turn up in a day or so.”



Mãe said we should try to buy Picardo for the trip home, since so few places along the road stocked it. Whatever is in Picardo (its ingredients are a secret kept by the manufacturer) helps us get by without blood.



We walked a few blocks to a liquor store. The clerk dusted off the bottle Mãe handed him. “Not much call for this stuff,” he said. “Tell you what—I’ll give you a discount if you buy two.”



“Thanks.” Mãe set money on the counter.



He wiped off the second bottle. “This is your lucky day,” he said.



“We’re not lucky,” I said. Words and worry spiraled through me. I might have said more, but Mãe said, “Why don’t you wait outside?”



So I stood outside the liquor store while she made small talk with its owner. Three teenagers sat in a car in the parking lot, debating which of them would go inside and try to buy a bottle of vodka. I noticed them idly, the way one takes in surroundings that don’t matter. One of them left the car, slamming the door behind him.