The Year of Disappearances

When I came out of the office, Mãe looked at me and beamed. Her relief was almost too obvious. I thought, Did she think I was going to talk about demons and harbingers?



My mother looked even happier at the mention of Professor Hoffman. “He was one of my teachers,” she said. “Does he still play the theremin?”



“He does.” Ms. Martinez picked up the phone and called Professor Hoffman.



“What’s a theremin?” I asked.



“An electronic instrument.” Mãe’s hands traced the shape of a rectangle. “It sounds like music from another world.”



When Ms. Martinez put down the receiver, Mãe said, “And is he still writing letters to the editor?”



“I’m sure he does.” She grinned. “But the local paper stopped printing them a while back. He was sending in two or three a week.”



On the way to meet Professor Hoffman, Ms. Martinez pointed out the barn, the theater, the library, and the student union, whose basement, she said, was occupied by a cafeteria. “All the food we serve is organic, and most of it is grown locally,” she said.



Around us, students meandered to and from classes, talking. I heard fragments: “spend the summer in Costa Rica,” and “they said no, they already went broke paying tuition.” Others continued to frolic (there’s really no other word for it) in the leaves. Someone sat on a stone wall, playing a wooden flute.



The interdisciplinary studies offices were next to the chemistry department in another building, also made of wood and glass. The corridor we walked down was lined with crude portraits, all featuring the same dark-haired young man, painted on black velvet canvases.



“The chemists love the King,” Ms. Martinez said.



I wanted to ask who he was, but Mãe sent me a quick warning: Don’t. I’ll explain later.



Professor Hoffman’s office door was open. “Well hello, Sara,” he said, ushering us in. He looked at my mother as if he’d seen her only the day before: a quick glance, a nod. Then his eyes fell on me.



He was a thin man with graying hair, wearing rimless glasses, jeans, cowboy boots, and a shirt the color of mustard. “What do you think of this?” he asked, pointing at the corner of his desk.



Cecelia Martinez, I noticed, had left us. There wasn’t enough space for another person in the room.



The desk, like the office itself, was covered with assorted objects: papers and books, of course, but also toys made out of tin, rocks, wooden blocks, bars of soap, cans of soup. I looked down at the corner and saw what appeared to be a dead snake.



“Is that a coral snake?” Its skin had bright bands of red, yellow, and black.



“Well yes, it is. We have several of them in the woods around here. Lately an unusually large number of them has been turning up dead.” He turned to Mãe. “Are you still keeping bees?”



I wondered how he knew. “I wrote a paper on honeybees while I was a student,” Mãe told me. “He remembers everything.”



“Yes,” she said to Professor Hoffman. “And an unusually large number of them has been turning up dead.”



“It’s happening with birds as well.” He sifted through a pile of papers on the desk, and I half expected him to pull out a dead bird. Instead, he picked up a journal and leafed through its pages.



We stood, watching him. There was no place for us to sit. Every chair in the office was occupied by objects.



“Here it is. The Audubon Society says that common bird populations have been declining dramatically, in some cases down as much as eighty percent, over the past forty years.”



“What’s causing the decline?” Mãe asked.



He flipped shut the journal. “The most immediate causes are man-made. Overdevelopment means a loss of natural habitat. And the habitats that remain are often polluted. Not a pretty picture.”



He tossed the journal onto his desk and turned toward me. “Well well, who the hell are you?”



As we drove home that night, I told Mãe what she already knew: I wanted to apply for admission to Hillhouse.



The dormitories we’d toured weren’t any cleaner or larger than the ones we’d seen elsewhere. Students everywhere seemed intent on packing as much as possible into the cell-like rooms. Ventilation was poor, and the scent of patchouli oil (Mãe told me its name) overpowered several other odors.



But these rooms seemed more inviting to me because they were older, and most had the same long, narrow windows that we’d seen in the other buildings. Every window was a framed picture of trees. And the students collectively had impressive energy; everywhere we looked we saw them running, skateboarding, dancing. Nearly everyone we’d seen on the other campuses moved slowly, hunched forward, carrying heavy backpacks; most held cell phones to their ears.



Yes, I told my mother, I could see myself at Hillhouse. “A legacy,” I said.



“If you have to leave me, I’d rather you were there than anywhere else.” Her profile turned away from me, but I saw her jaw clench and the right corner of her mouth turn downward.



“I’m not really leaving you,” I said. “Am I?”



“You’re beginning to take your place in the world.” She tried to brighten up. “It will be good for you, Ariella. And it’s not that far from home.”



We drove for a while, not talking. Finally I said, “Mãe? Who’s the King?”



She told me about Elvis Presley, the rockabilly singer who became an international pop idol. She told me that people still claimed he never died, claimed they saw him walking through malls and airports. Some thought he might be a vampire. Then she sang to me, a song called “Heartbreak Hotel.” It might have been Dashay’s theme song, I thought.



Now I knew about the King. Why he so appealed to the Hillhouse chemistry faculty forever remained a mystery.



We came home to an empty house. But the half-full cup of tea on the kitchen table was still warm, and next to it lay a copy of the local newspaper, opened to a page with a photo of Jesse on it.



I skimmed the article. He’d told the police a new version of the night he’d arranged to meet Mysty—in this one, he couldn’t remember whether she’d turned up or not. He claimed to have lost his memory of the night in question. He was now considered the only person of interest in the case. The police still didn’t have enough evidence to name him a suspect.



“The night in question.” “Person of interest.” What a strange language people speak when they talk about crime.



When Mãe and I heard the sound—a low-pitched nicker—we stood up at the same moment. The horses had come home.



We ran down to the stable. A long white horse van was parked next to it. Dashay must have driven it from Kissimmee, where the horses had been boarded while the stable was repaired.



A stone statue of a woman riding a horse stood at the stable entrance. She was Epona, the goddess of horses, and she’d moved with us to Kissimmee when the hurricane struck. Dashay must have brought her back.



Inside, amid the sweet smells of new lumber and hay, they were waiting for us in their stalls: Osceola, Abiaka, Billie, and my favorite, Johnny Cypress. They were named after leaders of the Seminole tribe. Johnny shook his black mane at the sight of us.



Dashay was there, too, brushing Abiaka. “We got back this afternoon,” she said. “I came down to tell them good night. They’re happy to be home.”



Some people claim that animals don’t experience the emotions people ascribe to them—that they care only about food and water and shelter. Those people haven’t spent much time around horses.



Or cats. Grace came into the stable and headed straight for Billie, her own favorite. Billie was a cream-colored mare with patient manners. She lowered her head and sighed through her nostrils as Grace rubbed against her foreleg.



Our family wasn’t complete, but the horses helped. We spent the next day riding, going down back trails that meandered toward the gulf. Snails’ trails, Mãe called them, because they twisted and turned arbitrarily. Billie stayed behind with Grace for company. In the old days, Bennett had ridden Billie.



At noon we stopped on a beach near Ozello for lunch at a little restaurant called Peck’s. We ate oysters and shrimp at picnic benches outside. From where we sat we couldn’t see the nuclear power plant, and I tried to forget it existed.



A cool breeze swept in over the water. The sight of my mother and Dashay, and the horses grazing nearby, made me feel at peace. I didn’t let myself think about the future, about the prospect of leaving them.



After lunch Dashay went over to Abiaka and talked to her for several minutes. Dashay’s mouth was close to Abiaka’s ear, and her voice was too low for us to hear.



Mãe shook her head, telling me not to try to listen in, but somehow I knew that Dashay was talking about her heartbreak.



She reminded me of a short story by Anton Chekhov called “Misery.” The story’s epigraph is “To whom shall I tell my sorrow?” An old man tries to tell the story of his son’s death to the customers who ride in his carriage. No one will listen, and in the end he confides in his horse.



Later that week, when I sat down to work on the application for Hillhouse, my personal experience essay was inspired by Chekhov, Dashay, and the animals who suffer our confessions so patiently.



Chapter Nine



Naming an emotion is the first step in coming to terms with it. Researchers have found that the amygdala, the part of the brain that triggers negative feelings, is calmed when we give our feelings names. That’s why we feel better after we confess to animals.



The amygdala is considered a part of the reptile brain, devoted to our physical survival. Some scientists claim that meditation, or the Buddhist practice of “mindfulness,” keeps the amygdala under control.



My father had taught me the practice of daily meditation, but I’d discontinued it when I left Saratoga Springs. Now, as I prepared to leave my home in Florida, I began to meditate again. It helped me cope with the anxiety I felt at the thought of leaving home.



Hillhouse had what were called “rolling deadlines” for applications, but I wanted to send mine in as soon as possible. The second essay was supposed to focus on art imitating life, or vice versa. I chose to analyze a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, which begins:



As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;



As tumbled over rim in roundy wells



Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s



Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;



Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:



Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;



Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,



Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.



The images and the language mesmerized me. I’d seen kingfishers and dragonflies in the air, and I felt the truth of the lines, but I had to read them several times before I began to understand them. I wrote about watching kingfishers and dragonflies, about the congruence between what they are and what they do, and about how this truth applies to humans: their actions define them. I wondered, did that apply to vampires as well? But I couldn’t write about vampires. Once again, I censored myself.



The final essay was to express how the applicant envisioned herself as a part of Hillhouse. This one stumped me. I went to find my mother.



Mãe was in her study, writing a letter on the thin blue paper that she used for transatlantic mail.



“How might I ‘envision’ myself ‘as a part of Hillhouse’?” I asked.



She frowned. “Do you want me to be one of those parents who tells you the answers?”



“Of course not.” I’d read online that some college applicants actually hired others to write their admission essays, and I wondered: Didn’t they realize how such actions defined them? “But I don’t know how much of an outsider I’ll need to be. It’s not as if I can tell everyone I’m a vampire.”