The Year of Disappearances

“Please, Mãe. Call her now and ask her to come. Tell her there’s a sasa waiting for her.”

“Ariella, what are you talking about?”

“I’m sure I’m right,” I said, although I wasn’t. “Please.”

She looked at my face, my eyes, and shook her head. Then she said, “Very well.”

While my mother went to use the telephone in her room, I went back to my father’s bedside. His face was still turned to the wall, and Root apparently hadn’t moved. She seemed to be reading the journal in her lap. I pulled a chair between her and my father and sat in it.

“Remember that pill I asked you to test?” I said. “The one called V?”

She raised her head. The mole on her chin had sprouted new hairs—four of them, about an inch long, dark and bristly.

“What about it?” she said.

“You made a big mistake,” I said. “That was no sugar pill.”

The light in her left eye intensified. “Are you telling me what was in that pill?”

“I’m telling you,” I said, wondering what it was I was trying to tell her, wondering why my thoughts were so scattered. I shook my head, pressed my hands to my temples. Inside my brain, I heard a kind of buzz.

Mãe came in and put her arms on my shoulders. “You’re tired,” she said, her voice soft. “Go on now, have a snack, and then take a nap in my bed. I’ll stay here and keep Mary Ellis company.”

The confidence in her voice told me she’d talked to Dashay. I left the room without saying another word.

Her bed smelled of lavender and chamomile, and its cotton sheets were worn soft as flannel. I fell asleep almost before I took my shoes off.

Someone was standing in the bedroom doorway, watching me sleep.

I heard my voice say, “Mama?” As far as I knew, I’d never said the word before. Perhaps as a baby I’d said it, hoping that she who had never been there before would suddenly manifest herself, respond to me.

“Not your mama.”

My eyes opened. Dashay sat on the edge of the bed, her brown eyes steady on mine. She stroked my forehead with both hands and pushed back my hair. “You’re all right,” she said. “Broke your heart, looks like. First time always hurts the worst.”

She lifted her hands and sat back. “Now you better wake up. I just had a look in at your old friend Ms. Root. We have some work to do there, you and me.”

I sat up and reached for the water bottle next to my bed. But Dashay pushed my hand away from the plastic bottle.

“Where’d you get that?”

I told her about the kindness of the gas station attendant.

She read the label: “Orion Springs. Bottled in Miami.” Then she moved the bottle out of my reach. “He may have been kind, all right. But I’ve been hearing stories about bottled water from Miami. I’ll tell you some later. Meantime, you stay away from that stuff.” She held the bottle up to the light. It was a third empty. “You feel funny?” she asked me.

I laughed, and it wasn’t a happy sound. The spectrum of all I’d felt in the last day fanned through me.

She lifted a patchwork tote bag from the floor and rummaged though it. She lifted out a glass bottle and handed it to me. “Drink this. It’s from the springs back home.”

I took a long drink from the bottle, felt the cool water flow down my throat, into my veins. My thoughts began to form clearly again. From the window came the crash of the ocean; the tide must have been coming in. I breathed deeply and drank again. When the bottle was two-thirds empty, I said to her, “I hope you brought more.”

“Local water’s okay.” Dashay set down her bag. “At least, it tasted fine last time I was here. But yes, I did bring some more. So you finish what you have there. Wake up, get your thoughts straight. Then we need to go to work.”

I drank the rest of the bottle. “Mãe’s still with my father?” I asked.

“She is.” Dashay wore a green-and-black batik-print dress that made a pool of freshness in the room. “Along with that Root, who’s sitting in her chair like a sphinx, all full of secrets she’s not telling. You know what she’s up to?”

I told her about meeting Malcolm, about the moment when he and I arrived at the conclusion that Root was responsible for the fire in Sarasota. “She could have put Dennis up to it. And she could be the one who made my father sick,” I said. “After all, she had the opportunities. She’s the one who made his blood supplements.”

“Why would she all of a sudden want to hurt Raphael?” Dashay said.

“I don’t know.”

She sighed. “And what happened to you? Why are you here, looking like somebody killed your best friend?”

She and I winced simultaneously.

“Ari, I’m sorry,” she said.

I shook my head. I couldn’t put what I felt into words, but I let her sense the depth and weight of my feelings: about losing Kathleen, and Mysty, and Autumn, and about finding Bernadette and Walker together.

After a while she said, “Didn’t I tell you? Love is misery.” She looked into my eyes again. “You haven’t had a thing to eat, since when? Come on and help me doctor Ms. Root. Then we’ll do some serious cooking.”

Ms. Root did not want to be doctored.

She sat, squat and impervious as a beetle, on the upholstered chair at the foot of my father’s bed. Her posture told us she was not about to go anywhere.

Dashay and my mother both tried to hypnotize her. If the problem hadn’t been serious, the spectacle would have been funny.

Dashay sat on the end of the bed, close to the blanket that covered my father’s feet. I wondered if he heard any part of what we were saying. If he did, he showed no sign of consciousness.

“Mary Ellis, I drove up here to talk to you.” Dashay’s voice was singsong, deepened by an emphatic Jamaican lilt. “I came here, all this way, to talk to you. I can see your eyes, now can you see mine?”

Root smiled—the sort of smile others call a smirk. I’ve never liked that word.

“Look at me.” Mãe moved in front of Dashay and bent over Root. “Mary Ellis, you need to take some deep breaths. In and out, deep breaths. Now your eyes are tired, and they want to close. Let them close.”

Root laughed, a sound like gargling dirty water.

Dashay and Mãe alternated their efforts. I watched, agonized, sure they had no chance at putting her under. Then I noticed a half-full glass of Picardo on the small table next to Root’s chair.

“I’m going to the bathroom,” I said. No one seemed to notice.

In the bathroom’s medicine cabinet I found a pill bottle with my mother’s name on it: sleeping pills prescribed by Dr. Cho. I took six of them into the kitchen and ground them up with the bottom of a spoon. Then I used the spoon to push them into a glass. I added two healthy shots of Picardo and stirred. Next, I poured three more glasses and set them all on a tray, careful to keep the unadulterated ones on the left.

With the tray in my arms, I went back to my father’s room.

“I’d find this annoying if it wasn’t completely ludicrous.” Root took the glass I handed her and gulped from it.

After I passed around the other glasses, I sat on the floor below the window. A sip of Picardo further cleared my head. Dashay had been right—something was in that water.

Mãe walked back and forth across the room. “You’ve been with our family for a long time. Raphael so admired your work, and we always thought you were our loyal friend.”

“But friends don’t try to poison their research partners.” Dashay leaned forward from her seat on the bed, peering at Root’s eyes. She sat back again. “Friends don’t set fires.”

They were playing good cop, bad cop. It wasn’t working.

Root watched them with undisguised contempt. “What have you ever done for him?” she said to my mother. “You deserted him. You didn’t take care of your own baby—the child you tricked him into having.” She took another drink from the glass.

Mãe’s face contorted. She wasn’t strong enough to hear this.

“Yes, I know about that.” Root’s voice was smug. “I know about all of it.”

I tried to tune in to her thoughts, but heard only the usual static.

“You know nothing.” Dashay’s voice was like a hiss. “You think you know, and all you know is lies.”

Root tipped her head to one side. “When it comes to lies, you’re the expert here. You lied to your family back in Jamaica, you lied to that poor half-breed Bennett. And when they realized you were lying, they all abandoned you.”

Dashay flinched.

I thought, Bennett is half-human, like me?

Root must have heard my thought. She turned to me. “Yes, another half-breed like you. Another child that in the end, no one wanted. A constant embarrassment to humans and vampires alike. You’ll never be accepted by them, and you’ll never truly be one of us.”

My eyes went to my father, instinctively expecting him to defend me. But he never moved.

No one spoke. She’d managed to wound each of us, and her satisfaction was evident. She sat back in her chair and finished the glass of Picardo.

Dashay sat on the bed, her shoulders slumped. Mãe leaned against the wall near me, her eyes closed. I kept my eyes on Root. And the second her eyes began to glaze, I said, “Dashay. Now.”

Dashay raised her head. Root’s eyelids had begun to droop, but she tried to open them wider as Dashay moved toward her.

“I see you now.” Dashay’s voice crooned, as if she were talking to a baby. “Oh, you’re so pretty. So ugly, ugly as sin. What a beauty you are. What a cretin. No mother could love you. My little beauty. Come out now, come to me.”

Her voice deepened, then rose. I put my hands over my ears. Mãe sat next to me, put her arm around my shoulders.

Was it ten minutes or an hour later that we saw the first sign of it? None of us could remember, afterward. But we all watched as a trickle of black fluid emerged from the corner of Root’s left eye. The trickle thickened, coagulated, and became a kind of blob that oozed out onto her cheek. Dashay crooned and beckoned and cupped her hands, waiting to receive it.

I didn’t see the last part—Dashay bent over Root, hiding her face. Then Dashay spun around, and I uncovered my ears.

“Quick, Sara. Get me a plastic bag.” Dashay’s hands pressed together. Between them I saw the sasa: black and slimy looking, an amorphous shape against her fingers.

Mãe ran out and came back with a bag. She held it open while Dashay slid the thing inside and zipped it shut. “Want to see?” she asked me. There was a weird pride in her voice, as if she were a midwife instead of an exorcist.

“I can see from here.” I wanted to see, but I didn’t want to get too close. The sasa looked like black gelatin, marked by one pink ring—the mouth that must have attached itself to Root.

“Ugly,” Mãe said, her voice low.