The Year of Disappearances

“Stay here,” I told him. “Breathe deeply. When I clap my hands, you will awaken.”



I didn’t clap yet. I went to the trailer door, threw it open. Autumn looked up at me, embarrassment in her face overshadowed by desperation. “Help me,” she said.



When I pedaled away from Harmony Homes Manor, I felt proud of myself—a feeling that lasted all of a minute or so. The hypnoses would prove successful, I was sure. Jesse would stop taking V, and Autumn would never smoke again. And neither one would remember being hypnotized.



Autumn had begged me to help her quit. I knew the health risks of smoking, and I figured I was doing something good. She was harder to put under than her brother, but once she went, she went deep.



Why, then, did I feel so guilty, after that first minute passed?



In my head I heard my mother’s voice—Meddling is wrong—and father’s words: With knowledge comes the obligation to use it justly.



And I answered them: I didn’t meddle. What I did was just.



So why did the guilt persist?



I rode through town, a sudden wind rising to whip my hair out behind me and to spin the artificial wreaths and candles hanging from overhead wires strung across the street. The sky had turned the color of wet ashes. Two young men in the post office parking lot shouted something after me, but I couldn’t tell if it was “Bitch!” or “Witch!” Once I turned the corner onto our road, the wind seemed to propel me toward home, faster than I wanted to get there.



I left the paved street and pedaled up the road leading to our gate. I found myself listening, listening hard. But the world was silent. No sounds of birds, or insects, or overhead planes. As suddenly as it rose, the wind had died off, and the trees were still. My bicycle tires rubbed softly against the dirt. I pushed my hair back from my forehead and tried to think of a song to push me the last mile home. All that came to mind was “Ring of Fire.”



I rounded the last bend, reminding myself of all I had to look forward to. The Yule feast was only a few days off, and Mãe and Dashay were already baking gingerbread, and Dashay had made a Christmas cake using dried fruit and dark brown sugar. The house would be fragrant with ginger and vanilla and Sangfroid and pine from the Yule tree they’d planned to get today. My first real holiday, I thought.



Then I saw the beige van. It was parked facing our gate (on which I could see the faint outline of the word KILLER, even though Dashay had painted over it).



I braked the bike so hard that I nearly fell. Then I regained balance, jerked the handlebars, and took off in the opposite direction. My heart pounded, and I can’t tell you all I felt. The sense of revulsion was almost familiar now, spreading through me like some dark viscous fluid, rising into my throat, making it hard to breathe.



When I heard the van begin to move behind me, I panicked. I swerved the bike down a side street and into the yard of the first house I saw: small, painted green, set back from the road. I jumped off the bike, let it fall, ran up the steps, and pounded on the front door.



A woman wearing a white apron stained with red blotches opened the door, and before she could say a word I pushed past her, into the house, and slammed the door shut. My hand shook as I set the dead bolt.



The woman was saying something, but I turned toward the front window, and through its lace curtain and gray window screen I saw the van roll up. It stopped. The driver lowered his tinted window. He smiled, showing rows of blackened teeth. I felt his eyes—the white eyeballs with no irises or pupils—pinpoint me, and for a second they seemed to blaze, to cut through the space and screen and curtain like a laser.



I slumped backward, and the woman managed to catch me. “Ariella Montero,” she said. “You’re Sara’s girl. My goodness. Who’s that in the van?”



“Is he gone?” I tried to stand, but my legs wouldn’t cooperate.



“You’re shaking.” She wrapped her arms beneath mine and half dragged me to an upholstered chair. Then she looked outside. “Yes, he’s gone.”



My arms were streaked with something red where she’d grabbed me. “Don’t worry. It’s not what it looks like.” She had a dish towel draped over one shoulder, and she used it to wipe away the streaks. “I just made a red velvet cake. I use cherry juice, and plenty of Sangfroid.”



I took a deep breath and lay back in the chair. “Thank you for letting me in.”



She grinned. “I didn’t have much choice, did I? You tore in here like the hounds of hell were after you.” I recognized her voice, and she began to look like someone I knew. I’d seen her at Flo’s Place, or at the supermarket. Probably both places.



“I’m sorry to interrupt your baking,” I said. “I’ll be okay in a minute, and then I’ll go.”



“You’re not going out there alone.” She was a small woman with curly, dark hair and a heart-shaped face, but her voice carried authority. “He might be waiting. He might come back.”



Her name was Nancy Cousins, and to this day I’m grateful for her kindness. She insisted that I drink a glass of Picardo and tonic, that I eat a slice of red velvet cake, still warm from the oven, and then that I call home.



“Ariella, where are you?” Mãe’s voice had an unusual silky quality to it. She sounded happy, without a care in the world.



Once I’d told where I was and why, she said only, “I’ll be right there,” in her more familiar tone: deliberate calm masking worry.



I hadn’t even finished my Picardo when she showed up. Why is she wearing a dress? I wondered. The dress was boatnecked, made of dark green velvet, and against it her auburn hair shone. Is she wearing mascara?



She was thanking Nancy for taking me in. “So you saw it, too?”



Nancy said, “A Chevy van. Tan colored.”



“And the driver?”



“Some weird-looking bald guy,” Nancy said. “Spooky eyes. You’d better call the police.”



Mãe rested her hands on my shoulders, as if to steady them.



He may not be alive, I thought, but he’s real.



We saw no more of the bald man that day. Mãe loaded my bike into the truck, having declined a slice of cake. “We have company waiting at home,” she said. “Thank you for being so kind.”



I wanted to know who it was, but she opened the passenger door and beckoned me in. “Do some deep breathing exercises, Ariella. Calm down.”



I focused on my breathing until we were through the gate. My T-shirt had red stains on it, I noticed. They smelled like cherry juice. “Is Dashay all dressed up, too?”



Mãe parked the truck and switched off the ignition. “She’s fetching the tree. Don’t worry about your clothes. You can change before dinner, if you want to.”



As we walked inside, I felt a sense of déjà vu: the smells of ginger, nutmeg, and cinnamon warmed the air. Mãe had placed a large red bowl filled with holly and ivy on the table near the sofa, and that’s where my eyes went first. But the air in the room had a strange shimmering quality that I’d almost forgotten.



He was sitting in one of the armchairs we’d brought from Saratoga Springs, wearing a charcoal-colored suit and a forest-green shirt. Without thinking I ran to him, threw my arms around him, pressed my face against his jacket.



I’d never embraced my father before, and I think it shocked him. But after a few seconds, I felt his arms lightly go around me. “Meu pequeno,” I heard him say. “Como eu o faltei.”



Portuguese isn’t one of my languages, but later my mother told me what he’d said: My little one. How I’ve missed you.



Mãe and I couldn’t take our eyes off him. His dark green eyes, the thick black hair springing back from his forehead, the pale skin, the cupid’s-bow mouth. And the mellifluous sound of his voice. Mellifluous: from the Latin mellis (“honey”) and fluere (“to flow”). It described his voice perfectly.



He was talking about Ireland, but I didn’t pay much attention to his words. I listened dreamily, as I might listen to music. But the sound of my name awakened me.



“Ari’s letter brought me here,” he was saying, “against my better judgment. I’d thought it important for the two of you to have some time together without me, since you’d been apart for so many years.” He took a sip from a glass of Picardo and set it back on the side table. “But Ari’s experiments with drugs and hypnosis suggested to me that my presence here might be a good idea.”



My mother said, “Drugs and hypnosis?”



“Cigarettes,” I said. “Only cigarettes.” The mention of hypnosis made me feel a new wave of guilt.



“Ari, no.” Mãe had been listening, and she knew what I’d done. “She’s been hypnotizing her friends out of their bad habits,” she said to my father.



“What’s wrong with that?” My guilt made me defensive. “If I can help someone quit smoking or using drugs, why shouldn’t I?”



My father put up his hand, palm facing me—his old signal to stop. “It’s commendable for you to want to help others. But hypnosis is an imposition of your will on theirs. Surely you see the impropriety of that.”



“But if they’re better off as a result, then it’s not an impropriety, is it?”



“By turning them into puppets, you rob them of the freedom to take action on their own.” His voice was crisp. “And you separate them from the moral consequences of their actions. Remember your Sartre, Ari.”



I didn’t want to remember my Sartre. I didn’t want to lose the argument.



So I changed the subject. “Father, I saw the blind man today.”



My father went along with the change of topic. “Where did you see him?”



“Parked outside our gate.” I didn’t want to talk about the man, didn’t want his presence in our living room. But I made myself talk. “I ran away, and he came after me. And I saw him in Sassa a few months ago, before Mysty disappeared.”



“You were right to run away,” he said. “I don’t know what he is, but he means us no good.”



“Mãe said you’ve seen him more than once.”



He rubbed his forehead, and I noticed the jade cufflinks fastening his sleeves.



“Yes. I first saw him in Glastonbury, and later, in Saratoga—” Then a wave of exasperation crossed his face and, as I watched, he disappeared—his body dissolved into air.



At the same moment, the front door opened, and Dashay backed into the room, both arms holding a burlap-wrapped tree trunk, followed by the tree itself, supported by FBI agent Cecil Burton.



Mãe reached over and picked up my father’s half-full glass of Picardo. She hesitated a moment, then handed it to me. She already had one of her own.



By the time they’d set the tree down, there was no evidence that my father had been in the room. Once again, Burton had forced him to turn invisible.



“That’s quite a tree,” Mãe said.



The tree stood nearly ten feet high. It didn’t resemble the ones I’d glimpsed through windows. Its branches were feathery, not pointed or sharp, and they grew in a spiral shape, winding up the trunk like a staircase.



Dashay leaned back, her hands on her hips, and gazed up at the tree. “I found it at the nursery in Crystal River. It’s called a cryptomeria. Isn’t it special?”



“It doesn’t smell piney.” I didn’t know what to make of the tree.



“No, it doesn’t. But later we can plant it outside, and it will grow maybe forty feet tall.”



The tree didn’t excite me. I wanted my father back.