The Year of Disappearances

Near the intersection where the dirt road became a paved street, I stopped to watch two dragonflies—one perched on the road itself, the other hovering several feet above it. Both had translucent wings; the one on the ground had light blue patches on its thorax and head, while the one in the air was black except for the vivid blue tip of its tail. I focused on the one on the road, on the intricate, yet delicate, etching of its wings. Suddenly the hoverer dove at the percher—and the odd thing, the thing that mystified me, was that the percher didn’t move, but let the other bombard it.



“Shoo!” I waved my hands at the attacker. I thought the other dragonfly must be injured, but after a second it flew off after the first.



As I walked into town, I wondered, Were they enemies or friends?



Homosassa Springs was a sleepy place on the Gulf Coast of Florida, next door to the town of Homosassa. I never could figure out where one ended and the other began. Most of the locals referred to both as “Sassa.” The area was popular with fishermen, manatee lovers, and vampires.



I passed the supermarket and the gas station, the restaurant (Murray’s) that we never went to and the other one (Flo’s Place) favored by vampires—and there were quite a few of us, attracted as much by the area’s mineral springs as by its promise of anonymity. I waved at the post office in case the postmistress might be looking out the tinted window. She was one of us.



At the library—a small brick building overhung by live oaks trailing Spanish moss—I used a computer to search for dragonflies. The most intriguing thing I learned: dragonflies are capable of motion camouflage, a predatory technique that makes them appear to be stationary even when they’re in motion. The predator dragonfly (called the shadower in the article I read) moves in a way that produces the image of an unmoving object on the retina of its prey, the shadowee—who might be food or a prospective mate. The camouflage works so long as the shadower keeps himself positioned between a fixed point in the landscape and his target. The shadowee sees the shadower as part of the background, right up until the moment it strikes.



The concept fascinated me. If dragonflies could camouflage themselves by the way they moved, could we?



Then I remembered what I’d come for, and I began to search for honeybees disappear. (I didn’t think dead bees would prove as productive.)



Yes, the phenomenon was happening elsewhere, across the United States and in parts of Europe. Some of the articles I read called it a crisis, others an epidemic. Bees were simply flying away from their hives and never returning. The few left behind were found dead, crippled, or diseased. Researchers weren’t sure whether to blame pesticides, mites, or “stress” caused by environmental factors. Some beekeepers blamed all three.



I printed out three articles to take home.



Before I left the library, I browsed through the fiction and nonfiction shelves, finding nothing much of interest that I hadn’t already read. Then I glanced through the stacks of periodicals. My father never had subscribed to newspapers, and the only periodical I knew well was The Poe Journal, devoted to literary and biographic scholarship about Edgar Allan Poe. My father said he found solace in reading about Poe.



More to my liking were general interest magazines devoted to fashion and entertainment. I’d been home-schooled, and I grew up without TV or movies, except for brief exposures to both at a friend’s house. Reading about popular culture had become a guilty pleasure of mine. My father would have dismissed this sort of reading as a waste of time. Why take an interest in temporal, inconsequential matters?



But American culture struck me as a roiling mass of contradictions, and I intended to familiarize myself with at least some of them. Why couldn’t film stars stay in love (or keep their underwear on)? Why were the athletes so likely to take drugs? Why were the political candidates so anemic looking?



And why were vampires so invisible?



As usual, I left the library with more questions than I’d had when I walked in.



The post office served as the hub of Sassa, the place where you’d run into the whole town(s) if you lingered long enough.



Two girls about my age leaned against the building. Like me, they wore cutoff jeans and tank tops that showed the straps of bathing suits underneath. Their eyes were invisible behind oversized sunglasses, but I knew they were appraising me.



The tall one with shoulder-length dark hair tilted her head to survey me from head to toe. The other girl had golden ringlets that framed her face, which had a doll’s tiny features, and a rose tattoo on her right wrist. Her glances were more discreet.



But the dark-haired one looked more interesting, to me. The way she stood, the way she wore her clothes, made her look older, sophisticated, cool.



For a second I thought about stopping to talk to them. Maybe they were new in town, like me. I hadn’t had a friend my age for a long time.



A beige-colored van idled in the post office parking lot. The driver’s window was rolled down. The driver was a big man with a shaved head and fleshy lips. Even though he wore sunglasses, I knew his eyes were fixed on the girls.



By the time a girl turns fourteen, she’s accustomed to men staring. But this man showed more than casual interest. He’d turned his thick torso to face the window, and he leaned forward, his mouth half-open.



Another thing about the man: he wasn’t human. But he wasn’t a vampire—I could sense that even from fifty feet away, even if I couldn’t tell you then how I knew. He was another kind of other.



The two girls watched me, not him. I slid off my own sunglasses and let them see the direction of my eyes. I jerked my head in the direction of the van, to be sure they got the message.



That’s when the driver saw me. When he took off his sunglasses, I flinched. His eyes were entirely white; they had no pupils. He must have seen my reaction, because suddenly the van jerked backward out of the handicapped parking space.



Before he drove away, he smiled at me—and the worst part was, I recognized the smile. I’d seen him earlier that summer, crossing a street in Sarasota, a day or so before the fire and the hurricane. Then, and now, I had a feeling hard to describe, a combination of revulsion and paralysis and fear, dark and swirling in me. I felt I’d encountered evil.



The dark-haired girl said, “Relax. He’s only a perv.” Her voice was low pitched and close to a monotone.



I wish she’d known then how wrong she was.



She said, “I’m Autumn.” The most expressive part of her face was the dark sunglasses.



“You must have a birthday coming soon,” I said.



“My birthday’s in May.” She kicked the wall behind her with her flip-flop. “My mother just had to name me after her favorite season.” The sarcasm in her voice made favorite season a deep shade of red, bordering on purple. But I sensed she didn’t share my ability to see words in color.



“My name’s Ari.” I turned toward the blond girl.



“Mysty.” She was able to talk and chew gum at the same time. “Spelled with a Y.” She pronounced spelled like spayled.



Autumn said, “Two wahs.”



I looked at them, and they looked at me. “I’m going swimming,” I said after several seconds of mutual scrutiny. “Want to come?”



Mysty yawned, but she thought, Why not?



Autumn said, “Whatever.” I couldn’t hear what she was thinking.



Listening to others’ thoughts is one of the compensations of being a vampire. But it calls for concentration, and it works much better with some minds than with others.



After a brief swim in the river—the shallow water felt too warm to be refreshing—we sat on an old dock to dry off. I’d brought an oversized towel with me, which had plenty of room for the three of us. Autumn and Mysty lay back on the towel to sunbathe while I reapplied thick coats of sunblock. They talked as if they’d known each other forever, but from their thoughts I knew better.



Autumn’s family, the Springers, had lived in Sassa for more than twenty years, and Mysty was a relative newcomer, like me; she’d arrived four months ago. Both of them were far wiser than I was in the ways of the world.



“Seein’ Chip tonight?” Mysty asked, her voice lazy.



“He says he has to work.” Autumn’s voice was dismissive.



“You put all that stuff on, you’ll never get a tan.”



It took me a second to realize that Mysty was talking to me. “I never tan,” I said. “I’m susceptible to burning.”



Autumn said, “I’m susceptible to burning,” in a higher-pitched version of my voice. “What the hell is susceptible?” she said in her own voice, low and hoarse.



Mysty flipped onto her stomach. “Lordy, give me a cigarette,” she said.



Autumn took a battered pack of Salems out of her jeans pocket. She wriggled out a cigarette and threw it in Mysty’s direction. Then she threw a second one at me. I picked the cigarette up and looked at it.



Autumn sat up, a cigarette stuck to her lip, and fished a matchbook out of another pocket. She lit Mysty’s cigarette. Mysty cupped her small hands around the match, even though there was no wind.



Autumn turned to me. “No, hold it like this,” she said. She opened the fingers of her right hand into wide vees and inserted the cigarette between her index and middle fingers. “How old are you, anyhow?”



“Fourteen,” I said.



“And you never smoked?”



Mysty watched us, smoking. She didn’t need instruction.



“Make your fingers relax.” Autumn’s brown hair wasn’t nearly as long as mine, I thought. Mine reached my waist.



“Dang it, you look like you’re holding a pen. Here, watch.”



She removed the unlit cigarette from her mouth and held it in her left hand, her fingers loose, almost limp. With her right thumb she slid open the cover of the matchbook and folded a single match so the head of it just reached the emery strip. Then she swept the match head against the strip with her thumb. The match flared on the first try and she lit the cigarette, taking a deep drag. She blew smoke in my face and handed the cigarette to me.



“Don’t you try to light a match that way,” she said. “Sometimes the whole book goes up. You can really burn yourself.”



I brought the cigarette to my lips and sucked tentatively. The smoke scorched my mouth and throat; I felt as if I were back in the smoke-filled condominium on the night of the fire. I coughed so hard I thought I might faint.



Their laughter sounded like artificial coughs. They must have practiced that laugh, I thought. Autumn laughed so hard her sunglasses fell off, and I saw her eyes—dark brown, elongated, with a weary expression and a flicker of something in her left eye that caught my eye, glimmered, then blazed.



She put the glasses on again.



I handed her the cigarette and reached for the water bottle in my backpack. The water helped, but afterward my throat still felt raw. I knew I’d never get the hang of smoking. Yet I vowed to prove some other way that I was worthy of their friendship. They knew things that I didn’t know.



But they didn’t strike me as particularly good company. Mysty’s thoughts were a jumble of cattiness (Autumn’s half as cool as she thinks she is), greed (Just let Autumn try to steal my fries at lunch), and self-doubt (Am I fatter than Autumn?). When I tried to tune in to Autumn’s thoughts, all I heard was static. Listening for even a few minutes made me tired.



Sounding bored, Autumn said her brother Jesse had a car and could drive us to the mall sometime. I didn’t know where the mall was. But I said why not. I gave her the number of my cell phone.



I walked home slowly, carrying my backpack, feeling the weight of my damp hair heavy on my shoulders, breathing in the world around me—the cicadas, the tall grasses, the songs of the mockingbirds, the hard blue sky. The landscape pulsed heat and humidity and smelled of sun-baked weeds. Since the hurricane and the fire, details of the natural world announced themselves to me more loudly, vividly, than before. Before, I’d noticed, but I’d taken them somewhat for granted, I’m afraid.



Then my skin began to tingle. I stopped moving. Something was watching me.

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