The Year of Disappearances

When I came in, Mãe was sitting on the sofa in the living room, her head bowed, weeping.



“What’s wrong?” I forgot all about my ankle.



She straightened and wiped her eyes with her hand. “I’m sorry, Ariella.” But after she spoke she began to cry again.



I sat next to her. Tentatively I stretched out my hand. She clasped it. Hers was damp.



“It’s everything,” she said. “Dashay. The bees. Your father.”



On her lap was an envelope addressed to her in his handwriting. “What did he write?”



“Nothing.” She wiped her eyes again. “He writes nothing about himself. It’s all about househunting and research and the colors of the Irish countryside.” She rubbed her hand on her T-shirt. “Today’s our wedding anniversary! He’s the man who says he remembers everything.”



I tried to think of words to console her. “He doesn’t like to talk about his feelings,” I said.



“I know that,” she said, “better than anyone.”



“At least he writes to you.” I’d had only two postcards from my father, postcards that anyone might have read with cursory interest—nothing like the thick envelopes of thin blue paper that came for my mother.



“He wrote to you, too.” Mãe gestured toward the envelopes on the side table. “It came yesterday, along with this one. I was so upset about the bees that I forgot to open the mail until today.”



I reached for the envelope with my name on it, surprised at how happy I felt. But I didn’t open it. I wanted to be alone for that.



Mãe nodded. Then she must have tuned in to my thoughts, because she said, “Oh no. Your ankle? I should have taught you how to roll a kayak.”



Alone in my room I tore open the envelope. It was mostly travelogue: the coast of County Kerry was stark, yet more beautiful than he’d imagined—gray outcroppings of rock against deep green fields, and ruins of castles a commonplace sight.



“History intrudes everywhere,” he wrote. Had I heard about the Skellig monastery? Monks had lived in stone huts resembling beehives on a rocky island in the Atlantic, off the Kerry coast. They’d abandoned the monastery during the twelfth century, he said. They left because of divisiveness after some of the monks became Sanguinists.



He hoped I was keeping up with my reading. Then he quoted some lines from a poem by William Butler Yeats: “O may she live like some green laurel/Rooted in one dear perpetual place.”



At the end, he wrote, “I miss you.”



It was not enough.



Mãe said I had to spend at least a day resting my ankle. Lying immobile made me grumpy. To cheer me up, she brought me magazines she’d bought at the drugstore in town.



These weren’t my preferred magazines. They focused on current events: government, politics, crime, and war. I leafed through them, growing more and more queasy and depressed. My father had called such events “ephemera,” saying that they recurred cyclically. He said that to pay attention to the current phases of the cycles would produce “delusions of control, and in the end, frustration.”



I wondered if my father was correct. True, I couldn’t do much to end war or stop crime. But some part of me felt grimly pleased that I knew a little more about them.



Until now, war had been a historic term to me; historians made wars sound reasonable, understandable, even noble, with analyses of all sides of the conflicts. I looked at the photos in the magazines and thought, History is just another kind of story.



Mãe came in carrying dinner for two on a tray. (Dashay was “out,” Mãe said, her tone telling me not to ask where.)



When she’d set it down, she said, “You still look sad, Ariella.”



“I’ve been reading about politics.” I unfolded a napkin and spread it across my lap. “Father never paid any attention to them.”



“All the more reason why you should.” She handed me silverware. “If we ignore the world, we do so at our peril.”



“I guess. But I miss the old days.” The sentence sprawled across the table, a pink-tinged sentimental mess.



“So do I, at times.”



“What do you miss?” I asked.



“I miss Saratoga Springs, sometimes. Did you think I was going to say I missed my privacy here, before you came?”



“Maybe.” The thought had occurred to me more than once.



“I’m glad you’re here. It means everything.” She opened a covered dish and began spooning creamed oysters onto a bed of sautéed spinach and toast points.



“I miss my bicycle.” That thought, too, came out of nowhere. With my father, I’d almost always thought before I spoke.



“Your bike must be in storage, along with the furniture from the old house.” She handed me a plate, which I balanced on my lap.



The oysters smelled of lemon, cream, butter, and tarragon—they hinted of faraway places I’d yet to visit.



“Why don’t we go and get your bike?” she said. “We’ll need furnishings, once the house is rebuilt. Raphael said we should take what we need from the storage unit and give away the rest.”



Mãe said she’d book us a flight to Albany early in September. We’d rent a truck, go to Saratoga Springs, and drive back with our possessions. I liked the idea of seeing my hometown again, in the company of my mother.



Over dinner, we talked about my father. “You’re right—Raphael never had much of a sense of politics,” Mãe said. “Maybe because he had no sense of family, or of being connected to a group. He never knew his father. His mother died when he was born, and he was raised by an aunt.”



“Then you’d think he’d want to be around us even more,” I said. I’d barely touched the food, and Mãe’s creamed oysters were almost irresistible. “He could have stayed long enough to give us a chance.” A chance to be a family, I thought, finding the words too sentimental to speak.



Mãe heard them anyway. “But if someone grows up without that closeness, they don’t know how to experience it with others. They may be afraid of it.”



“I grew up without it.” I pushed away my plate. “Are you saying I’ll never be close to anyone?”



The words hurt her, but she tried not to show it.



She moved the plate toward me again. “If you want your ankle to heal, you should eat.”



I speared an oyster with my fork and took a bite.



“It’s easy to assign blame,” she said. “I blame myself for leaving you all those years ago, and for letting you go out alone in the kayak today. Those are legitimate blames. I know the part I played, and I know the circumstances. But to blame someone who can’t help being himself—that’s not fair.”



I sensed that she was right. But I couldn’t give up the story I’d written in my head of a family reunited, living in harmony. No, I wasn’t ready to let that story go.



It must have been close to midnight when I awoke. Often the tree frogs’ noise or the night song of courting birds or the bright moonlight was intense enough to wake me, but tonight I sensed nothing—no frogs, no birds.



And no moon hung in the night sky. Yet when I looked out at the moon garden, I saw the orange glow of a lit cigarette.



I limped into my mother’s room, then Dashay’s room. Both beds were empty.



So I went out to the garden alone. I moved silently, keeping close to the house until I drew close enough to see who was there.



Jesse sat on a wrought-iron bench, wearing shorts and a T-shirt. Without the sunglasses, he looked handsome; his features were even, and he had large, dark eyes with long lashes. But something about the way his mouth and jaw moved suggested that he felt at odds with the world, and belligerence had become his preferred way of dealing with it. He didn’t notice me until I stood right in front of him, and he didn’t seem surprised to see me. “So this is where you live,” he said, his words slurred. Clearly the beer party had been a long one.



His shoes were crushing some of the white flowers raised by Dashay’s tears. “What are you doing here?” I said. And I wondered, Where are Mãe and Dashay?



“Wanted to make sure.” He belched. “You okay.” He smiled and patted the bench next to him. “Have a seat.”



“This is private property.” I kept my voice low, but I felt furious. “You have no right to be here.”



He laughed. “Come on. Ari. Ari, you need to lighten up. Mysty and my sister said so, too.” He belched again. “Whoops. I need a drink. You got beer?”



“Go home.” I’d come close enough to read his T-shirt: THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE.



“That’s not right. Least you can give me—the dude who saved your life—is a couple beer or three.” He smiled again, trying to charm me. Then his mouth and jaw twisted back into their habitual clench.



I moved as close to him as I dared. “Look at me.” Can a drunk person be hypnotized? I wondered. That hadn’t been mentioned in the articles I’d read online.



For the record, the answer is yes. It took longer than I care to remember now—long minutes of me urging him to stare back at me, to breathe deeply, to hear only my voice, to go deeper and deeper into relaxation, until I felt the little click of engagement, the moment when he couldn’t look away, and I knew that I was in charge.



“You will go home.” I paced my voice slowly, evenly. “You will drive slowly.” I assumed that he’d come by boat, since our front gate had an alarm system. “You will not exceed the speed limit tonight. Or ever again.”



Suddenly I began to enjoy myself. “You will never come back here. You will not be able to drink beer. The taste of it will nauseate you.” I wondered how far I should go, and decided I’d gone far enough. “Go now. When you arrive home, you’ll regain your conscious state.”



And he rose obediently, turned, and headed for the dock.



I went inside, back to bed, congratulating myself on a job well done.



But not done well enough. Next morning at breakfast, Mãe and Dashay let me know that in emphatic terms.



At first they were contrite about not being home when it happened. They’d gone to Bennett’s house—Dashay first, Mãe later, looking for Dashay. Bennett had not come home.



Then they interrogated me about what I’d said to Jesse. Mãe reminded me that she didn’t approve of hypnosis in general, but given the circumstances, she could understand why I’d done it.



“The girl had to defend herself.” Dashsay looked exhausted, but she spoke vigorously. “And telling him not to speed or drink, that can only help him. Maybe save a few manatees, maybe his own life.”



I smiled. I craved their approval.



Then Mãe said, “What else did you say?”



“I told you everything.”



“You didn’t tell him that when he became conscious again, he wouldn’t remember what you’d said?”



The looks on their faces told me I had more to learn about the art of hypnosis. “They didn’t mention that in the articles I read online,” I said. Most of them had been scripts to help someone quit smoking or lose weight—scripts designed to be remembered.