Zero at the Bone (7 page)

She was only a few hours late. I tried to deny it, but it was out of character for Anita to be away nearly all night. She would spring into the house, with some bright explanation.

Accidents and doctors didn't bother Anita, although she once said that everyone should be allowed to take a pain pill before they had a shot. She said her rare visits to Dr. Ames, the dentist, were calming, sitting there looking at the ceiling. One of the few times I had seen Anita really startled was when she nearly stepped on a gopher snake in the backyard, the brown-dappled creature whipping across the dirt and into the weeds.

Dad put his hand on my shoulder and gave it a squeeze. A good squeeze, like he was feeling the muscle, the bone. “I'm going to make some oatmeal,” he said.

My mother didn't move. She wore the bathrobe Anita had given her the Christmas before. We all called it the spinach-omelette robe, yellow-and-black plaid flannel. Mom had a silver-colored clip in her dark hair. Anita got her blond looks from Dad. I knew it had not been Mom's idea to get out all the old photos.

We all jumped a little when a grinding noise erupted from a corner of the sink. Mom had poured the ingredients into the machine before she went to bed, and now the bread maker was following the commands of its internal computer. I found myself wondering if it was making whole wheat or rye. Anita preferred whole wheat.

I hadn't wanted to tell my parents about the flat tire the year before, not in every detail. Merriman thought the tire had been slashed. Someone had stuck a blade into the sidewall, but not all the way through—just enough so that twenty miles up the freeway, the Michelin blew.

Merriman has dark skin, the color of strong coffee. He told me some people didn't like someone like him driving a brand-new Mercedes. I didn't see things that way—once a graffiti artist had covered Ziff Furniture with four-letter words. It isn't always racism or bigotry. Sometimes it's just mean fun.

It was as though I wanted to protect my parents from some ugliness in the world. Maybe I was embarrassed for people, knowing that my parents were warmhearted and would not understand cruelty. I felt the same way about an especially bloody fight at school. I just didn't like to talk about it at home.

“You know what they kept asking?” Dad said.

I was supposed to bounce the conversational ball back, and I did. “What did they keep asking?”

“They kept asking if we had a fight of some kind.”

I thought it was a pretty good question. But Anita and my dad had never had fights the way the Blankenships did, howled curses and the tinkling, crashing of God-knows-what getting smashed. Our family arguments had been only a little more heated than talk shows on Channel 9, pointed disagreements about whether chickens should be kept in cages or be allowed to range free.

“They keep suggesting maybe she's off with a friend,” Dad was saying. “They say maybe she had some reason to be alone.”

“Things like that happen.” Where did I get this tone in my voice, this sound of reason and calm?

“Kyle knew,” Mom said, looking straight at the wall.

Dad had a bottle of Windex out, and a roll of paper towels.

“Why else,” she said, “would he call and ask to speak to her?”

Maybe she was with Kyle right now, I thought. Dad squirted Windex on the stove top. “I called Kyle,” Dad said.

“You called Kyle's house?” I heard myself say.

Dad gave a quick nod, a silent
sure
.

That was even more dramatic than checking the list of unclaimed bodies with the police. I had to marvel at my father. When he went to battle stations, he went all the way. “You talked to Kyle's dad?”

Dad was wiping the top of the stove with the Windex, making it shine. “For a second or two.”

Kyle's dad was the most unfriendly person I had ever met. He had made his money selling house trailers. I had never heard him speak a complete sentence. Kyle was tactless and curt, but his dad was like someone who would blow your head off. Plus, he had just had a pig valve put into his heart.

Mom tilted her head, meaning that she was listening but not about to talk. Dad was addressing her when he added, “Kyle says he doesn't know anything.”

“I don't believe it,” I said, and Mom gave a slow nod, her eyes closed.

I said, “Kyle knows.”

“He was very sleepy,” Dad said, as though that proved something.

“Kyle knows Anita wasn't telling us everything,” I said. “All this time, shaving a few hours off work to—” To do what young women did with men. I was the one who would shout at Anita when she came home. “He knows who she's been going out with.”

“Calm down,” said my dad.

“I'm going to go get Kyle and drag him over here,” I said. “I want him to sit right here in this kitchen and look me in the eye and tell me he doesn't know where Anita is.”

“Relax, Cray,” said my dad from somewhere behind me.

But I was rushing through the living room, hooking the keys to the Jeep off the plate on the side table with one hand, feeling my eagerness to have somewhere to go, something to do.

I could picture Kyle telling me he didn't know anything about Anita, his eyes looking everywhere but right into mine.

The sky was light blue to the east. A bird fluttered in the bottlebrush plant, chirping.

All night, I thought.

She's been up all night, gone, away. And she never called.

11

I flooded the engine.

I turned the ignition, pumped the gas, and the Jeep gave its hearty rumble, and then gasped. It choked and fell silent, rolling down the driveway a little by its own weight until I yanked on the parking brake.

Dad climbed into the silent Jeep and sat next to me. I could sense him trying to think of the right thing to say, looking away from me like a passenger enjoying the view—a front porch and an ornamental plum tree. The front garden had been planned by a man with an M.A. in gardening. He had started a company, Green Planet, and we were one of his first customers. No one else had stepping-stones leading up to their garden faucet, the step beside the dripping faucet green with moss.

“Why don't we have any normal cars?” I asked.

He rubbed his hands together like someone who was cold. It was gray but warm, low morning clouds overhead.

“You don't have time to do all the work,” I said. I meant that I personally didn't know enough about cars to replace engine parts, clutch plates, whatever it was that had to be done. I couldn't help him—he would have to do all the under-the-hood labor himself. And I meant, what was going to happen today, a shipment of nightstands due out or we would never make the deadline.

“The Jeep is great off-road,” he said.

We shifted into four-wheel drive about once a year, in the Sierra, near our cabin at Lake Tahoe. The Jeep could drive up and down cliffs, especially in reverse. But it was clear to me that my father liked his cars for reasons that had only a little to do with how they performed.

“Mom is picking out a picture of Anita,” I said.

“Just in case they need one,” he said.

I stared up the street, willing myself to see her. I closed my eyes. Count to three, I told myself, and open them—she'll be here.

We got out of the Jeep and went inside.

We sat in the kitchen, taking turns calling emergency rooms, starting with Kaiser Hospital and Summit, and working down the list. I was surprised how many hospitals there were. They all recognized my sister's description from my father's earlier call—long blond hair, gray-blue eyes.

Some of them were convalescent hospitals, nursing homes. I didn't call them. But I called every surgery center and twenty-four-hour clinic in Alameda County. She began to sound like a character in a story, Alice in Wonderland, someone pretty but imaginary.

My dad had already called each hospital two or three times, and by the time I was asking the question the response was sympathetic but a little clipped, and one nurse told me
she
would call
us
if there was any word. But there was always a moment or two while the receptionist checked a list, surveyed a list of names, people who were brought in during the last hour.

The entire house smelled like baking bread.

For a while, I decided to play a sort of game. The game was: Pretend this is some other day, Anita in bed asleep. I went about a normal routine and took a shower, washing my hair with Breck's baby shampoo. Anita had pointed out that it didn't leave gunky conditioner in my hair, and it didn't make me have to squint and grimace while I went about washing myself, which is supposed to be a pleasant experience.

As soon as I turned off the water, I could tell nothing had changed. The silence felt the same. I opened the door of the bathroom, swirling steam slipping out into the hall, and listened. Dad had a radio on in the room he used as a den, where he kept his books and videotapes. A radio voice talked about the morning traffic, the Dumbarton Bridge closed westbound due to a big rig that had flipped.

I dried my hair in the doorway to Mom's room. I almost never walked all the way in. She sat at her desk, her head in her hands.

Her office is like the headquarters of a successful expedition. At her elbow, beside the computer printer, was the top section of a Neanderthal skull. It was just the bony bowl of the cranium and the brow ridges, the eye sockets only half there. I had always felt the wonder of having such a relic in the house.

Messages come in on the fax machine, by e-mail, questions from scientists in Boston, New York. My mother is an expert on the East Bay Hills. She is famous among ten people, and they all like to hear from her.

My mother was at her desk, the way she would be all morning on a usual day. But it was too early, and she was not working. I knocked gently on the door.

I couldn't tell if she heard me.

“Mother?”

She wasn't weeping. Weeping would be better than this. She sat looking straight ahead, at the computer, the row of rodent jaws. It struck me how little my family looks at each other. Eye to eye.

“You want me to help a little later?” I asked.

“Help,” she said, saying the word like a foreign sound.

“Screen some sand?”

“I have about twenty pounds of it,” she said. She turned her head so I could see her profile. She had lost the weight too fast, I thought. Her neck skin was slack. Fossil collectors in the field often collect bone-rich earth by the bucketful. Sometimes I shook dirt through a screen, picking out the tiny ribs and teeth that sifted free.

“I have to report to Jesse in the afternoon,” I said.

We were doing really well. Like actors hired to play us in a movie, an early rehearsal, but none of us showing how scared we were. Our remarks didn't fit together very well, but that didn't matter. “Derrick won't be going in to work,” she said.

Of course not, I thought.

“But you might as well,” she said.

My family had a rule about taking time off from school or work: you never did. Unless you were paralyzed or had major surgery. The Monday I spent home with my concussion, seeing double, was the first day I had spent home since eighth grade. I had been sick sometimes during those years, but I went to school with a fever more than once, and one spring I had poison oak so bad the school nurse sent me home.

Dad never took time off. Not when he worked as a furniture designer in San Francisco, sixteen hours a day, planning a revolution in wicker. He won awards, made money, bought a factory, and now he could work every hour of the day if he wanted to.

Mom picked a blue notebook off her desktop, and held it up by her ear. “Take this down to Derrick,” she said.

I didn't want to take it, but I did, and I didn't stop to glance into Anita's room when I passed the door.

12

Dad was standing in the front doorway, full daylight through the open door, morning clouds burned away.

“You better go talk to Mom,” I said.

He turned, looked me a question, and I handed him Anita's blue address book.

He opened it very carefully. It was a new book, the most recent in Anita's long history of phone numbers. The pages turned stiffly. Anita had very correct printing, made for keeping records, filling out forms. She knew a lot of people.

Even upside down I could make out familiar names, Kyle Anderson right at the beginning of the book. One summer, when I was nine, Anita had pretended she was a librarian. She made library cards for each of us, and kept records, checking out old
Scientific Americans
to Dad.

“Look through here and see if—” He couldn't complete the thought. He wanted me to see if there was a name I didn't recognize, or a name I did, someone dangerous, mysteriously attractive.

“We shouldn't be looking at her stuff,” I said.

“Who is this?” said Dad, showing me a name, Dr. Coors, with an address on Piedmont Avenue. I turned the pages of the address book, hearing Anita's exasperated whisper in my mind. When she was annoyed she dropped her voice to a hiss. She didn't like to shout. She would understand when she saw how tired we looked. We didn't know what else to do.

“Who is Dr. Coors?” asked Dad, demanding. He wanted Dr. Coors to be the name we were looking for, a shadowy doctor, specializing in street drugs.

Dr. Coors had very blond, nearly white, curly hair up and down his arms. “He gave Bronto his shots,” I said.

Dad took the stairs three at a time, hurrying to talk to Mom. I followed more slowly and stopped at Anita's room.

Mother had been everywhere, tugging drawers, opening files. Boxes were open, old videos and comic books, remains of Anita's childhood, scattered across the floor. Mom was good at this sort of thing. Even the mess was more organized than it looked, her old jump ropes in a pile with her obsolete, worn-out Ping-Pong paddles and brightly colored tennis balls.

A diary was open beside a stack of old report cards. Mother had no right to look at this, and there it was, spread open in the morning sun.