Zero at the Bone (18 page)

“There's a story behind that parking zone,” said Jesse, trying to shift into a more amiable style of conversation.

“A
story
,” said the truck driver, so mad now that he had proven he was right, he was striding with a little jerk to each step, swinging up into the driver's seat, the engine grinding, starting up.

Mr. Ziff had painted that red no-parking zone himself, decades ago. It was a not a legal red curb, just Mr. Ziff with some paint that wasn't the right kind, weathered by now to red freckles.

I had the truck's license plates memorized, California and Wyoming and Arizona plates fastened to the trailer frame, so I could call the police if I had to. But Jesse jumped up beside the driver, onto the step beside the cab. He was hanging on to the door handle, searching for a better grip as the truck driver accelerated up toward the main street.

Maybe the driver would have slowed and stopped, having given the situation some thought. But Jesse was right there, his face on the other side of the window, saying in a loud voice, “Hey.” Unexcited, like he was trying to get someone's attention in a situation without any urgency, all the while trying to hang on.

I could tell by the way the truck driver lost one gear and found another, how determined he was getting. Having Jesse's face on the other side of the window just made him all the crazier.

Everyone on the sidewalk was shouting
hey!
People who didn't speak English were shouting
hey
, someone on the other side of the cab slapping on the door, running along beside the truck.

I jumped down from the mound of scraps and ran hard, getting to Jesse as he began pounding on the side window. He gave me a look and made his eyes wide, trying to be humorous about it, how he was going to ride all the way to Castro Valley standing on a six-inch ledge.

He would have to jump. He made a tense grin of effort, bracing himself to leap off the rolling truck and I told him to wait. I didn't shout. I just said the single word: “Wait.”

I leaped in front of the truck as it ran the stop sign, the driver hitting the steering wheel with the heel of his hand angrily, giving me a blast from his horn. The truck brakes hissed, the huge vehicle shrugging sideways.

That was all I wanted—just a full stop so Jesse could jump off.

I stood to one side, then, while the truck driver jerked the rear wheel of his rig up the curb, scraping the mailbox, and shifted gears all the way down the street, past the shops that made kitchen cabinets and the foundry that made manhole covers.

“Some of these drivers get really tired, on the road all day and all night,” I said, as though I knew anything about it.

“Don't do that, Cray,” said Jesse, panting.

I must have given him a question with my eyes.

“Don't get run over,” he said.

An hour later another truck slid into place, and a white-haired man with a stoop loaded nearly all the nightstands himself. He whistled a little tune as he signed the bill of lading, pressing hard so his signature went through all the copies.

That night we got the phone call.

Detective Waterman was at the coroner's office. A body had just been found off Skyline Boulevard, a young white woman, dead four or five weeks.

30

The call came just before dinner, tuna and mushroom soup over flat noodles. I made it myself, and stirred in some frozen peas toward the end. Mom came down from her office and shook some dried parsley flakes over it, and then rummaged in the cupboard and found a little red-and-white metal box of paprika.

It was good to see my mother taking an interest in helping, because usually she sat sideways and ate without talking, and then later, when my dad was on the computer in his study, sending messages to his Find the Children friends, she would be in the kitchen again, eating chocolate pudding out of the container, or asparagus soup, right out of the can.

She sat at the table, sideways, looking off at the collection of kitchen knives on the wall, boning knives, paring, carving, butcher, all of them lined up in no order, right next to the tool with a handle like a knife, but not a knife at all, a rod like a file, for sharpening the carbon-steel edges.

I spooned the mixture onto plates, and we were just sitting down, when Dad's phone made its electronic burble. It was a new system, a fax machine-answering machine combo, with a huge memory so Dad could listen to fifty messages at once. He had bought it at Whole Earth that week, and installed it in the kitchen, right under the calendar.

He picked it up, holding his paper napkin in one hand, and listened, and my insides tightened. Even before he was off the phone, my mother and I could tell this was not just another phone call.

He said, “Yes, Detective Waterman,” in a stiff-sounding way, letting us know who he had on the phone. He listened, and his face went slack, nerveless, and not pale so much as shiny, a sickly light just under his skin.

He cupped the receiver in one hand, the napkin drifting to his feet. He told us the news after getting ready, working out the words in his head. “They won't be able to make positive identification because they don't have dental records.”

No explanation, just that opening sentence, but we had already guessed what had happened.

My mother didn't say anything.

“The detective is giving us an interim report,” said my father, cupping the phone. It was only then that he told us about Skyline Boulevard, and the phrase
dead at least a month
came out of his mouth like something he hadn't really said, words in a balloon, like in the comics, his lips half-parted but not moving.

My mother got up and dragged the chair over to the telephone, a gray Panasonic with a memory that could hold fax messages, voice messages, and half a ream of paper. She took the phone from my father, but my father didn't back away.

Detective Waterman was saying something, and my mother didn't shake or nod her head the way my dad did when he was on the phone. She absorbed the words and replied, “I have them here,” as she leaned against the back of the chair.

My father blinked.

I carried the plates full of food over to the sink, clearing the table, slipping the unused paper napkins into the trash can under the sink.

“They are current dental records,” my mother said, being patient, spacing out her words, the way she sounded when she explained to someone that the fossil record goes back hundreds of millions of years, not just back to Noah's Flood.

When my mother hung up, she felt around for the chair, and sat. Without looking in my direction, she said, “In my office, in the right-hand drawer, in the red plastic folder.”

I was upstairs at once, past Anita's room, and in the doorway of my mother's office. By then I really understood what I was looking for, and I sat in my mother's desk chair, looking at the dust cover she always draped over the computer when she wasn't using the office, trying to calm myself down, trying not to make a mistake.

That was how I thought of it, the way my mother did. She knew that if we are careful, if we collect and store and file we will keep mistakes from being made, keep harm from happening. I knew why she had asked Dr. Ames, our dentist, to send these.

I found the red folder in the big drawer, the one that rolled out heavy, full of papers. I did not open the folder until I was downstairs, and then I thought—what if the folder is empty?

My father took off his slippers and put on dress shoes, rolling down his shirt sleeves, although they were still wrinkled where he had rolled them up. My mother put on a big wool jacket, and slung her leather bag with the strap over her shoulder, both of them getting ready, no one saying anything.

I made sure the stove was off, the black heating coils all cool. Once I had left a pot holder on a burner that was not all the way off and the quilted pad got a little tan along one edge. I locked the front door behind us. I thought I should bring something to read. I imagined myself in a waiting room, like waiting for an operation to be over, needing a story to make the time pass.

I rode in the back of the Jeep, looking backward, an experience I had always found enjoyable. The seat was bolted to the floor and had a seat buckle with a shoulder strap, and the arms of the seat had hard foam-rubber grips. You could hang on as the Jeep drove up and down canyons, that was the theory. But I found myself hanging on with one hand, even though the ride was smooth, my dad taking it easy on the clutch, all the way downhill, to the freeway.

In the other hand, I held the red folder. I did not have to open it again to visualize what was inside. The folder held black-and-white film paper clipped to sheets of paper, photos of molars and their roots, the silhouettes gray, like mountains captured by moonlight.

Anita told me she liked the peppermint flavor of the Novocain, the squeak of Dr. Ames's rubber gloves, being brave after the fact. She had had only one filling in her entire life and it was there in a follow-up X ray, a jagged empty star at the crown of one tooth.

31

The Alameda County Coroner's Bureau is on Fourth Street, just behind the blue Health Services building. The coroner's bureau has no windows—a beige, faceless fortress. An old-fashioned blue sign,
CORONER
, sticks out over the sidewalk, with neon tubing over the letters so they show up at night.

Only in the rear of the building could we see an entrance, and that was where the white van with the sheriff's star on the side door was backed up, all the way into the shadows. We got out of the Jeep and I felt myself feeling just one pace behind my own body, my bones and my muscles a loose fit, clothes that didn't belong to me.

My mother took a long time accepting the red folder from my hands, putting it into her briefcase. Dad looked at the red folder and bunched his lips, an expression like a kiss, but thoughtful. Then he was off, hurrying to a side door, one with big dark letters,
THIS IS NOT AN ENTRANCE
.

He read the words after trying the door, and we followed him around to the front of the building. He held open a metal-framed glass door for us, a door much too small for a building this size. It was one of those doors that close partway and then close a little more, and then close almost all the way, and stay like that for a while.

There were no doors leading from the small lobby. A potted tree leaned toward the daylight, a broad-leafed plant in a brick red tub. The steps were brick red, too, worn brown in the middle of the stairs, and the banister was teak, I thought, or some other tropical wood worn dark.

We passed a door stenciled
NO ADMITTANCE
, and Dad knocked. His knocks did not seem to make any sound, absorbed by the metal door. He jiggled the knob, then went up another flight. My mother was breathing hard, dragging herself up the stairs, Dad hurrying on ahead, stumbling on one of the steps. He began to call out “Hello?” like someone wandering into a house before any of the other guests.

He knocked on another door, and a young woman with dark hair leaned out to look at him without seeming to understand, and then looked at my mother and then at myself, puzzled. Or perhaps she was not—perhaps she was tired, or nervous about something happening in her own life. I tried to read the look in her face as she heard my father explain who he was, mentioning Detective Waterman's name.

Someone came up the stairs behind us and said, “Do you folks need any help?”

We all turned, and something about us made him stop.

“These are going to be the Buchanans,” he said over our heads, as though we weren't yet, but would be when he was done with us. He was a burly man with a red mustache and a star on his chest, right above a gold ballpoint pen, its clip over the front of his pocket. He was either full-muscled or starting to get fat. He filled out his shirt so it was tight all over his upper body.

The young woman's face softened into understanding. She said, in an accent I did not recognize, that we should go on upstairs and Detective Waterman would be with us soon.

“You just want to head up there,” said the man with the star, assuming we could not possibly understand the young woman. “Take that next door, go on in, and some good people will be there to help you.” He had a name on his chest, white lettering in a black rectangle, but I could not get my eyes to work, or my brain to register.

“We need to know what's happening,” I heard myself say.

“I don't have any answers,” he said, nearly filling out the entire stairway, side to side, “and I'm afraid there won't be any answers for just a little while longer, and believe me, I know what a strain this is on all of you.”

How many times had this man stood in this building and given that sort of cop speech? I saw how little he knew about us, how many times he had trudged up and down these stairs, the rubberized radio antenna wiggling at his hip.

None of us were moving, arranged on the stairs, looking down at a big red-headed sheriff who had to tilt his head to look past me at my father and say, “My understanding is, Detective Waterman is expecting you.”

I heard my father thank the man, and a door opened. Light from a room lanced down the stairwell, and we found ourselves in a room with chairs that had straight metal legs. It was the kind of room that usually has old magazines, but there weren't any. A satellite view of San Francisco Bay was framed on the wall, the salt flats at the end of the South Bay bright reds and yellows. Behind a steel-mesh window a woman with a star was making a gesture, indicating that we should sit down, as she picked up a phone and spoke into it.

The interior door opened and a figure entered the room, a tall, dark-skinned man in a suit. There was a pin in his lapel, a golden Oakland tree, encircled by the words
TWENTY YEARS OF SERVICE
. “Mr. and Mrs. Buchanan,” he said. He turned his face toward me briefly. “And the brother. I am Steven Wallace, the Coroner for the County of Alameda.”