The Year of Disappearances

“Not to my knowledge,” Mãe said. “It would go against all his principles.”



“Well, he had to bite the man who vamped him—otherwise Raphael wouldn’t be a vamp.” Dashay lifted Grace and set her outside the kitchen, shutting the door.



Mãe and I exchanged a look, and a name: Malcolm, the name of my father’s old friend, who had turned on him, made him a vampire against his will. Malcolm had vamped my mother, too, after I was born.



“Do we need to keep on talking?” Dashay yawned. “I want to wash my hair.”



“Have we answered all your questions?” Mãe asked.



I swallowed a mouthful of berries without tasting them. I said I supposed so.



“Wait,” Dashay said. “The reason we don’t go to Murray’s? It’s too bright in there. Those fluorescent lights make me batty. Plus, they don’t serve Picardo, and they have a terrible cook.”



Later, when we were alone, Mãe told me she’d driven by Bennett’s house that morning and seen a FOR SALE sign on its lawn.



“Oh, rats,” I said. We were working in the herb garden, and I stopped weeding. “Have you told Dashay?”



“Not yet.”



“You have to tell her. And it will break her heart all over again.”



“Tell her what?” Dashay leaned out of her bedroom window, her hair wrapped in a towel. Then she heard what we were thinking. We didn’t have to say a word.



My mother and Dashay made a date with Bennett’s real estate agent to see the house later that night. They pretended that they wanted to buy it.



“Why not be honest?” I asked. “Tell her that you want to find Bennett.”



Dashay refused, and Mãe agreed with her. “This is the best way,” Mãe said. “Ariella, are you packed yet?”



We were leaving for Saratoga Springs the next day.



“I need my metamaterial suit,” I said.



“No, you don’t.” She didn’t like the suit, which my father had given me in order to let me turn fully invisible. “I don’t know where it is, and in any case, we’re going to be visible on this trip.”



That meant I’d be packing jeans and T-shirts. “Whatever,” I said.



They both looked shocked. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll pack.”



Mãe said, “Don’t forget to bring a dress. We’ll go out to dinner, you know.” She liked to dress up and go to fancy restaurants.



Left on my own after dinner, I turned on my laptop and decided to try to answer some questions by myself.



It took a while, but after reading more than a hundred posts by strangers, I arrived at the definitive reason why vampires and mortals tend not to mix: lack of trust.



Vampires lie. They lie to mortals almost all the time, by hiding their identity. And they lie to each other for all sorts of reasons. When a vampire blocks her thoughts, she may be lying—or she may want you to think she’s lying, which is a more sophisticated tactic.



Of course mortals lie as well. But because we can hear their thoughts (not to mention hypnotize, scare, and bite them), we have a decisive strategic advantage.



Could vampires and humans ever really coexist in the peaceful, productive way envisioned by the Sanguinists? I began to doubt it. Could vampires lead ethical lives if they couldn’t be trusted? Weren’t honesty and trustworthiness essential to ethics?



If my father had been there, we would have talked for hours about those questions, considering an array of interpretations and implications, redefining terms, using language to link the objective, social, and subjective worlds. But he wasn’t there, and the questions remained a muddle to me.



When my cell phone rang, I was happy to stop thinking. Mysty’s voice, breathier and higher-pitched than mine, informed me that she had a date tonight with Jesse.



I knew she wanted my approval. “That’s good,” I said. “Really good. Great.”



“We’re going down to the dock to, um, stargaze.”



“It’s a good night for it,” I said. “A full moon, and Mars will be rising in the east.”



She giggled, as if stargaze meant something else. In terms of talking to a friend, I was out of practice.



“I’ll be sure to ask Jesse about Mars,” she said. “I hope the bugs aren’t bad. Mosquitoes love me.”



I thought about recommending herbs that repel mosquitoes. My mother grew some. Then I realized that she didn’t want advice. She wanted sympathy.



Have you ever analyzed human conversation? Most of it lacks purpose in the sense of accomplishing a task or seeking information. Most of it attempts to establish a personal relationship based on mutual agreement. I knew this from conversations with my friend Kathleen, who, for a while, had called me almost every night.



“Mosquitoes,” I said now. “Yuck.” Mosquitoes don’t bother vampires. I guess our blood isn’t to their taste.



“I hate mosquitoes.” Mysty’s voice had a faint Southern drawl, softer than Autumn’s Florida accent. “I hate birds, too.”



“Why do you hate birds?”



“I’m afraid of them. They have such mean little faces.” Mysty made a funny sound, a kind of guttural chirp, like the noise cats make when they’re unsettled. “They look like they want to peck out your eyes.”



I couldn’t think of anything to say.



“What are you afraid of?” she asked me.



“Being left out.” I said it without thinking.



“Oh, don’t you worry about that.” She sounded amused. “I’ll make sure you’re part of all our parties. And when we start school again, I’ll introduce you around.”



“I don’t think I’m going to school,” I said. It hadn’t even been discussed.



But I don’t think she heard me. “Do you think Jesse likes skirts better or tight jeans?” she said.



Our phone call meandered for another hour. My ear hurt. I said that I needed to go, and then came ten minutes more of Mysty saying, “Okay. Bye. Wait,” and launching into new conversational threads that wove around, looped back, and veered off again. I pictured our conversation as an enormous spiderweb, knotted and hitched and so convoluted that it made my head ache.



When we finally did say good-bye, I stood up and walked around the house for a while to clear my brain. Then I took my new telescope out onto the lawn.



It was an eight-inch reflecting scope that weighed fifty-four pounds. My father had taught me to use it before he left for Ireland. “The purpose of a telescope is to gather light,” he said. “Homosassa is a good place to see the sky, since it’s relatively free of light pollution.”



When I looked through the eyepiece for the first time, I’d felt disappointed. All I saw was a blur of darkness and light.



“Be patient, Ari,” my father said. “You need to learn how to see. Remember when you first tried to find constellations? You couldn’t find a bear or a lion.”



I remembered. At first I could barely see the Big Dipper. Then, one night, I was suddenly able to see the same figures named by stargazers thousands of years ago—with a few exceptions. Cygnus to this day doesn’t look much like a swan to me, and Perseus doesn’t look like a man, much less a hero.



My father said, “With practice, your eye will pick up details that are invisible to you now.”



The humidity level was so high that I felt as if I were swimming as I set up the scope. It reminded me of the air before the hurricane hit—dense and hot and gusty. I wondered if another tropical depression was on its way.



Tonight was not optimal for stargazing after all. Clouds kept scudding across the sky. But intermittently I glimpsed craters and mountains on the moon, and the strange shadows the mountains cast on the plains. I repositioned the scope. I was looking for constellations when I saw a dull red glow, an enormous star, twinkling from Orion’s right shoulder. Before I could study it, it was covered by cloud.



But I remembered its location, and later I identified it as Betelgeuse: a red supergiant star more than six hundred-fifty times as large as the sun. The Web site I found said that Betelgeuse is “nearing the end of its life.”



Imagine the supernova explosion predicted for Betelgeuse. The dying star will shed its outer layers and form a cloud of glowing gas and plasma. The scientists don’t agree on the explosion’s effects on Earth. Some think we’ll be bombarded with particles and gamma rays. And they don’t agree on its timing; some think it might take place in the next thousand years or so. But they are unanimous about one thing: Betelgeuse will die. I wondered where I’d be when it happened.



Suddenly, from the outer corner of my left eye, I saw a small movement in the trees near the deck. At the same moment my skin began to tingle. I pulled away from the eyepiece, and then I fell backward, onto the deck’s bench, the night world around me spinning. A sense of nausea rose from deep in me, and I felt something approaching out of the dark. I put my hands on either side of my head, trying to stop the spinning. But I couldn’t make it stop, and I couldn’t make what was out there go away. Then I passed out.



When I opened my eyes again, cold air swirled around me. I sat up. I felt no dizziness, no sensation of being watched. The telescope was still there. The stars hadn’t changed position.



Have you ever been outside at night and sensed that you were not alone? Odds are, your sense was correct. The night is as full of things, seen and unseen, as the sky is full of stars.



Chapter Five



When Mãe and Dashay came home that night, Dashay walked through the living room right past me without saying anything. Her lips pressed tightly together, but nonetheless they trembled.



I lay on the sofa, wrapped in a blanket. Mãe shook her head, warning me to stay quiet. After Dashay shut her bedroom door, Mãe said, “Well, that was a mistake.”



The real estate agent had been delighted to see them at first. “She said she’d put up the sign only this morning, and she knew the house would sell fast. She offered us sweet tea.”



Ignoring the realtor, Dashay had headed straight for the bedroom, opened a closet door, and said, “His clothes are still here.”



Not, my mother observed, the most subtle tactic. And in complete disregard of the strategy they’d planned on the drive over to Bennett’s place.



“The agent said she’d never met Bennett,” Mãe said. “She listed the house after he faxed her a letter. They’ve hired professional movers to come in tomorrow to pack up his things.”



“So where is he?”



“Atlanta.” Mãe sat on the sofa and kicked off her sandals. “She didn’t tell us that straight out. She let it slip later, when I asked her about the advantages of living in the South.”



“Atlanta’s not so far.” I’d seen it on a map. That was one thing my mother had taught me: how to read maps. Before I tried to find her, I’d never thought I needed them.



Mãe laid her head against the cushions. “We asked her why the owner was selling, and she said he’d made the decision all of a sudden. She said she thought he was going to be married in Atlanta.”



I thought, Poor Dashay.