The Year of Disappearances
Page 4

“Watch out for those girls,” Dashay said as we sat down. “They gave me a bad feeling.” Abruptly she stretched her hands toward me. “Let me look at your eyes.”
She pushed my forehead back and leaned in close to cup my chin. I stared into her eyes: caramel brown from a distance, but flecked with orange and green and black and yellow, I saw now. It felt odd to look into them so closely.
After several seconds, she pulled away. “No, you’re all right.”
“What was that about?” I asked her.
She didn’t answer. She stared off into the distance.
“Her mind is elsewhere,” Mãe said, her voice gentle. “Let her be.”
And so we spent the rest of Unhappy Hour in silence, listening to the jukebox play a strange mix of songs that smelled of stale cigarette smoke and loneliness, each of them plaintive in its own way.
When we left the bar, I noticed a beige van parked down the road, near Murray’s Restaurant. “That looks like the van I saw yesterday,” I said.
It drove away before I could tell for sure.
Mãe and Dashay didn’t even hear me. They were each thinking about Bennett.
Later that night, when Dashay had retired to her room, I came back to the living room, sat on the sofa, and tried to tune in to her thoughts.
My rationale was simple: she was my friend; she was in trouble; and, clearly, she and my mother weren’t ready to tell me what had happened in Jamaica. I couldn’t stand being left out any longer.
Mãe glided into the room, wearing a white silk robe that shimmered as she moved. She took one look at me and knew exactly what I’d been doing. “You did hear what I said about eavesdropping?” She spoke in a fierce whisper. “It’s a bad thing—”
I said quickly, “Father always said that there are few if any moral absolutes.” I was suddenly reminded of how much he disliked people who interrupted others. The art of conversation in America is utterly dead, he’d said once. “Excuse me for interrupting,” I added.
“And so how would you justify eavesdropping?” She sat in the armchair facing me.
“Well, the infringement of her privacy is outweighed by the possible benefit,” I said, thinking as I spoke, hoping it sounded plausible. “I love Dashay. And I might be able to help her.”
“I don’t think you’re being logical,” my mother said slowly.
“You let me listen to your thoughts. What’s so bad about eavesdropping?”
“I let you listen sometimes,” she said, and proved it by blocking them; it’s easy to do that, if you’re one of us, though I often don’t remember to make the effort. “I’m not an ethical expert like you and your father, but in my opinion it’s not fair to eavesdrop or listen to the thoughts of someone who’s upset. It’s meddling, pure and simple, and meddling is wrong.”
I folded my arms across my chest. “Even if you think you can help them?” It was the first time I’d talked back to my mother, and I found it exciting. I wondered if I’d have had the nerve if the room wasn’t so dark.
Suddenly Dashay swept into the room. “Let it go, Ari,” she said.
But I had what I thought was the last word: “Dashay, you must have been eavesdropping.”
Sassy girl, Mãe thought. And Dashay thought, Just like her mother.
In spite of what I’d said, I knew that Mãe was right: listening to others’ thoughts was an intrusion, warranted only in exceptional circumstances. The trouble was, so many circumstances felt exceptional, that year.
In the end, I didn’t have to eavesdrop to hear the story. Dashay told me herself, a few days later.
Bennett had never wanted to go to Jamaica, she said. Dashay hadn’t been home for years—she left soon after her parents died in an accident—and the funeral of a grandmother didn’t strike him as the right occasion to meet her family. But Dashay cajoled him into going. (Bennett was easy to cajole—he was the sort of man who danced through life, laughing easily, making women want to flirt.)
From the first night, things didn’t go well. For starters, Dashay’s family had no idea that they were entertaining vampires. Dashay had grown up an ordinary mortal, but when she left home she was “vamped” (her word) in Miami—a city popular with the more vicious sorts of vampires. (Bennett was an other, too—but how that happened is another story entirely.)
In any case, Dashay’s family was a suspicious bunch, and her auntie was the worst. She wanted to know what was in the blood-colored flakes Dashay and Bennett sprinkled onto their food. She wanted to know why Dashay “didn’t smell right”—of course, vampires have no smell.
Auntie had always blamed Dashay for leaving Jamaica when her parents died, for not waiting until their souls were truly at rest. When someone dies, it’s thought that her spirit, or “duppy,” wanders for several days. There are special rituals to make sure the duppy is laid to rest.
One night Auntie saw Dashay and her cousin Calvin under a cotton tree. Dashay held Calvin’s chin in her hand, staring deep into his eyes. Auntie got it into her head that Dashay was a witch, putting a spell on her son. So Auntie went off into the hills above Montego Bay to see the obeah man—a sort of shaman who links the spirit world with this one. The obeah man listened to Auntie ranting about her niece, the witch, and he laughed at her.
Auntie came back home in a furious mood. She said to the assembled family members, “He tell me, what sort of woman are you, worrying about witches when you have vampires sleeping in your house?”
Dashay was speechless. And Bennett wasn’t there to defend her. Later, she wondered if maybe he’d seen Dashay and Calvin together that night. Maybe he got the wrong idea.
“Duppy get the blame, but man feel the pain.” Dashay repeated the phrase. “When things go wrong, Auntie always puts the blame on duppies, or on me.”
Dashay ran out of the house to look for Bennett, but she couldn’t find him. “The love of my life,” she said, her voice low. “Just like that, he was gone.” She blew across her palm, scattering imaginary dandelion fluff. Then she began to cry again.
That August I spent several more days helping Leon; we moved onto the roof, nailing strips of shingles into place, then came back down to staple stripping around the openings for doors and windows.
Once I looked up from my work and found Dashay face to face with Leon, her eyes inches away from his. I stopped, not knowing what to do.
“She’s making sure he’s all right.” My mother’s voice came from behind me. “She thinks that she can tell someone’s condition from their eyes.”
Apparently Leon passed muster. Dashay said something to him, then abruptly walked away. He looked baffled.
“Your friend is one strange lady,” he said to me later. “She said she was checking out my ‘sasa.’ What does that mean?”
I couldn’t help him. He was hoping it meant “sex appeal.”
That night at dinner I told Dashay what he’d said. But she didn’t laugh. “He has a small one, right near his liver,” she said, her voice low, close to a whisper. “Not big enough to worry about, just yet. I tell him if he won’t drink so much, the thing should leave him.”
“A small what?”
“A small sasa,” she said. She pronounced it “sahsah.”
“Like in Homosassa?” My vowels sounded harsher than hers.
Dashay nodded. “Not spelled the same, but the same sound, and I think the same meaning. Though some folks will tell you this place was named for pepper plants!”
My mother sighed and left the table.
“Sasa is spiritual power,” Dashay said. “People have it. Animals have it. If you kill a dog, say, that animal’s sasa comes into you, puts a spell on you, takes its revenge.”
“You can see this sasa?”
“I can tell when it’s in someone, yes.”
My mother carried a plate of risotto to the table. She sat down without saying anything.
“What does it look like?” I had to know.
“On the right edge of his right iris, it looked like light, like a spot of light, flickering.” Dashay passed a bowl of salad to me. “That’s the place tied to the liver.”
Mãe was eating, but I sensed her skepticism. “Can everyone see them?” I asked.
“No. First you need to be a foy-eyed.” Dashay coughed. “That’s a Jamaican word. Four-eyed to you. It means you can see ghosts and spirits and such.”
“I’ve seen a ghost.” The words came out, and then I wished I could take them back. They conjured up the image of my best friend Kathleen, who had been murdered the year before.
We finished dinner without talking. Afterward Dashay came up to me while my mother put away the leftovers. “I can try to teach you, if you want,” she said. “Teach you how to see a sasa.”
“Maybe someday.” Curious as I was, I didn’t feel ready to see any more ghosts. The one I’d seen still haunted me.
“Still snooping?”
From the living room doorway the next morning, Mary Ellis Root glared at me. She was my father’s research assistant.
I dropped the letter I’d taken from a pile of my father’s mail. Like the others, it was addressed to Arthur Gordon Pym, the name he’d assumed when he moved to Florida. Raphael Montero had “died” in Saratoga Springs.
“What are you doing here?”
Root looked different. Same oily dark hair pulled back into a bun, same beetlelike body stuffed into a greasy-looking black dress. But the three long hairs that had sprung from a mole on her chin like misplaced antennae—they weren’t there anymore. I wondered, had she plucked them?
“He asked me to collect his mail.” Her voice was raspy as ever. “And just in time, I see.”
It was so like her to accuse me of snooping when she had walked unannounced into our house. But I didn’t try to defend myself. After all, I’d been caught in the act of prying. And Root and I had a history of mutual hostility. I’d always wondered why she resented me so much; I suspected that she hated anything and anyone that interrupted my father’s research.
Mãe walked in, carrying a coffee mug. “Mary Ellis,” she said. “What a surprise.”
Her voice suggested the surprise was a pleasant one, but I knew better. She didn’t like Root any more than I did.
“I came for his mail.” Root never used my father’s name.
“Of course,” Mãe said. “Would you care for some coffee? Or do you prefer pomegranate juice?”
We all were sitting at the kitchen table, sipping juice, pretending we liked each other, when Dashay walked in and said, “They’re all either dying or dead.”
Root didn’t ask who “they” were. I wondered if she could hear thoughts. Although I suspected that she was “one of us,” I didn’t know for sure. I’d never been able to tune in to her thoughts, and her personal habits were a mystery to me.
“They act as if they’ve been drugged,” Dashay said. “That is, the ones that haven’t disappeared. The ones who stay, they walk around in circles like they’re lost.” Dashay talked with her hands as well as her voice. I felt relieved that she’d taken the trouble to check out the bees, sorry that it had taken a crisis to reanimate her.