Zero at the Bone (14 page)

Sometimes I just wanted time to stop. I told her I was sorry I caused her to worry, and she took hold of my shirt front, a handful of cloth, shaking her head, and I was a little frightened of what she might say.

She was sweating and breathing hard.

“I know I wasn't fair to you,” she said. “None of this is fair to any of us.”

“We have to look in her room again,” I said.

She looked up at me. Maybe there was a little hope in her eyes. She didn't speak. We both wanted the hope to last. At last she asked, “Why?”

“Because that journal isn't really much of a diary,” I said, feeling bright and fake.

She let go of my shirt, but I could see the imprint of her hand there, bunching the cloth. “It's an exercise book,” my mother said, almost proudly. “Anita was developing her mind.”

“Detective Waterman said she needed our help. I called her, and she was very nice.” I didn't like this tone of voice, eager, plainly lying. “She said that cases like this usually turn on the discovery of a name or an address. We have to look for notes and letters. Maybe another diary.” I wasn't exactly lying—I was exaggerating, wanting to give my mother something. “She said it was the best thing we could do to help.”

“You look, if you want to,” she said. She saw my hesitation, and added, “Go ahead.”

“You're an expert at finding things,” I said.

She said, “Yes, I am.”

23

I opened the envelope Paula had given me.

“I know you and your sister are so close,” the note began. It was a pale blue sheet of paper, matching the envelope, borrowed, I imagined, from Paula's mother.

“Close,” the note went on, “and so alike each other.”

This was the way she put it, a little awkwardly, but I could hear her voice as I read. “It must be like having your own body out there lost. It makes me think how much I underestimate you, when I heard you say it was an emergency. The tone in your voice made me think I was starting to know you, after all this time.”

Paula makes a little triangle over the
i
instead of a dot.

I wanted to search Anita's room right then. What I really wanted was to tell Anita how ignorant Paula was, how frustrating. There was no way Paula had been underestimating me. I was the one who had understood Paula, figured her out and got tired of her.

Besides, I was nothing like my sister. I wasn't going to go to bed. I was going to stay up reading and listening to an old CD my dad had bought in a half-price store on Solano Avenue, sound effects, a honey bee buzzing, pistol shots, a jet taking off, a horse race. A long list on the back gave the running time for each effect—four seconds for the bee, five for the pistol, one minute and four seconds for the freight train.

I fell asleep in my clothes.

Anita had found a photo of a dead wildebeest in a nature magazine. The animal had been killed by poachers for its horns or its hooves. The creature was decaying, mostly skull, but with a few ribbons of skin left, its eye holes staring.

Anita had ordered a T-shirt with this photo printed on it, and it was one of the few times my mother had lost her temper with Anita. “You are not wearing that shirt to the ballet,” Mother had said. It was almost Christmas, and we were all driving over to San Francisco to see
The Nutcracker
.

Anita said we were celebrating peace while animals were being slaughtered. Mom said that was true but beside the point. Anita ended up wearing it, but under her suede leather jacket. Now and then she would give the zipper a tug and we could see more and more of the neck bones, the empty eyes. Sometimes I couldn't tell if Anita was absolutely serious, or if she just had a very dry sense of humor.

I realized this was an earlier Anita, an Anita of a couple of years ago. Actually, wearing the shirt had been a challenge. People in malls had trouble giving the right change, having to count out the coins carefully with a dead wildebeest sticking out at them.

That was another feature of the T-shirt. It was a little too small for her, shrinking even when she used Woolite and cold water in the bathroom sink. For the first time I realized how grown Anita was getting—how full-figured, I mean. She did not have unusually big breasts, but I knew how men would see her, whisking her hair out of her eyes, sexy inside her dead-animal shirt.

It was the next day, morning, and the house was quiet. The bedroom light was still on, pale and useless in the daylight.

I didn't have to look—I knew Mother was still in bed, not asleep, just staying there. If Dad is in the house, the place feels different, something shifting, moving around, restless in some corner.

The house was still. I entered Anita's room and I had to murmur a silent apology, like a prayer. The T-shirt was still there, hung in her closet so long the neck hole was oblong. Mother must have seen how the closet was full of clothes, nothing missing.

The dresser was easy, waltzing it out into the middle of the room. The carpet where it had been was scored with the outline. The drawers came out, and I unpacked each one gently, underthings and pearl-button denims, frilly see-throughs and Nike terry-cloth sweatbands folded together. My mother's search had left key rings and wooden birdcalls tangled together.

I laid the dresser flat and felt along the unvarnished wood and the single, empty husk of a moth cocoon. The bed was not so easy, the headboard askew as I gave it a nudge. Every bed is a kit, slotted together, even a bed that has stood glued together in one place for years will fall apart if you nudge it the right way. I was very careful, turning over the mattress, feeling the undersides of the rails, feeling under the bedposts, turning over the mattress.

When I was done, I put it all together, carefully putting back the books Mother had left lying on the floor, making the bed three times, starting over, working slowly, getting it right, so in the end all the sheets were smooth, each blanket even, the coverlet perfectly straight, and turned down, welcoming.

I don't know when it became routine, when I gave up thinking each creak was Anita bounding up the front step.

Maybe it was that morning, Sunday, after an hour in Anita's room. I came downstairs to see my dad's oatmeal bowl already rinsed and upside down in the drainer, a stiff wire rack that holds the dishes upside down so they dry without being dried off with a towel. The pot was there, too, dripping a little bit onto the sink top. Dad usually likes old-fashioned Quaker Oats, cooked slow, with brown sugar on top.

Maybe as I sat there waiting for the toaster to pop, I remembered the dreams I had spent the night with, Anita in every single dream, talking. Sitting in the kitchen, lounging in the living room, laughing. Just being herself. Usually my dreams are strange and impossible, flying high above the neighborhood, or visiting strange places and experiencing the impossible feeling I've come home. The dreams about Anita were like reality.

Dad had left one of his legal-yellow pads on the kitchen table, beside the turkey saltshaker, a bird with holes in his back where the seasoning shakes out. “I've gone out with some posters,” read the note.

The pile of blue posters was crooked, and I straightened them up so they wouldn't fall over. The answering machine had eighteen messages in its memory, but I didn't play any of them.

I think that Sunday was the day we began to avoid each other, not out of annoyance, but because we reminded each other that Anita was not there.

I spent most of the day up in Montclair, on the other side of the freeway. I walked—Dad had taken the Jeep, and it would take a degree in auto engineering to get the other cars rolling. Montclair is a district of Oakland with stone walls covered by ivy. The streets have more trees than our neighborhood, bushy pines and redwoods. There were houses like the one I taped a poster in front of, on the bus stop bench, a cute brown house with yellow shutters, a Mercedes parked in front because the Porsche and the speedboat filled the garage.

I ran out of tape very early, stripping the roll down to a bare cylinder of cardboard. I bought a new roll of masking tape and continued, taping the posters to streetlights, a ragged strip on the top margin, and a matching one on the bottom. Sometimes I went into a Laundromat or a convenience store and showed them the poster.

The owners always gave permission, and if it was only a clerk, they said the owner wouldn't mind. One man asked if he could have a few for his church study group; they liked to lend a hand to deserving causes. The owner of a Laundromat said I should leave a stack over by the magazines. So many people were friendly in a kind, quiet way, impersonal, like people when they see someone being strapped into a stretcher, curious and pained and a little embarrassed.

The only way to carry a big roll of masking tape for most of the day is to put it on like a bracelet. It was awkward, and sometimes I saw one of the posters fluttering away in the wind, or passed one I had put up an hour before and found it torn, not by accident. People walk around, and if they see something a little unusual, they just idly reach out and give it a rip.

Only one person confronted me. It was in a latte house, where people sit to read the Sunday
Chronicle
and drink big coffee drinks with milk whipped into white foam. Anita had said the culture was a little hypocritical about drug addiction. She didn't sneer when she said this, she just raised the point, meaning we should be forgiving of people with drug problems. She said nearly everyone over the edge of sixteen was a caffeine addict, but I liked the smell of coffee more than the taste.

I didn't want to cover someone else's posters, used computers for sale, guitar lessons, so I taped Anita to the bottom frame of the bulletin board, putting just a kiss of tape on the bottom, so it adhered to the wall.

I heard the man yelling and I didn't bother to look. People yell sometimes. It usually has nothing to do with me.

“You will
not
leave that
stuck
to the wall,” said a loud, piercing voice. It emphasized the words in a searing singsong.

I turned, in no hurry.

“Take it off the wall,” said the man behind the bran muffins, a thick-necked man with black bushy eyebrows.

He had a point, in a way. Maybe the shop had just been painted. Masking tape could stick to the fresh ugly green and peel away a little scab. He had a good point. No doubt the system was that new messages were supposed to cover the old ones, until after a while there was a layer, weeks of lost cats and French cooking lessons.

But I didn't like everyone turning to look at me over their movie reviews. It was only half a room full, plus a few people at the round white metal tables outside, but every person was rolling eyes in my direction. I strolled over to the bulletin board and taped another poster right next to the first one.

I knew when I did it I was being childish. But not like a little child. Like a big one, someone about my size. I wanted him to come over and rip down one of those posters. I wanted him to edge past me and take hold of one right where it said
Missing
. And give it a tug.

The poster didn't say how much the reward was. It might not even be a good idea, I thought, watching the man with the eyebrows whisk off his apron. People were going to call up with fake hints, fishing for a piece of the reward. Maybe they would hope to get lucky. They might call up and say they saw her getting into a lavender Cadillac, or maybe pink, and it would turn out later that was the car the cops found abandoned at the airport.

Mr. Eyebrows slowed down as he approached me, eyeing the posters. He slowed way down, and stopped. He had a towel in one fist. I couldn't believe what he was saying.

He repeated it.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

He added, “I didn't have my glasses on.”

24

Kentia opened the door. Before now there had always been a polite smile, cool, few words between us. Now she spoke. “Come on in, Cray,” she said.

Merriman's sister held the door open for me, standing aside, and I felt hulking and clumsy, even though I had put on a clean shirt and a new pair of pants. It was the sort of long-sleeved shirt I usually unbutton, roll up the sleeves, until after an hour or two the tails are out and I look like someone who has been doing somersaults. But I was all tucked in, pausing in a living room glittering with antique silver and dark, polished wood.

“I am sorry to hear about your sister,” said Kentia.

I thanked her. I knew enough about wood to recognize mahogany. Bookshelves, table, a framed mirror. And I knew enough about furniture to recognize the custom-made leather sofa and side chairs, glittering brass tack heads. Every time I came here, they had new furniture.

“How are your parents managing?” she asked.

It was Sunday afternoon, and I had barely spoken to either of my parents all day. I had come home, still wearing the masking tape on my wrist, and changed clothes for my visit with the Merrimans.

“My mother is doing better than my dad,” I said. I thought about my mother for a moment. Was this true? And what power did Kentia have, to make me blurt out such frank comments about my family? I couldn't keep myself from feeling my wrist, making sure I still wasn't wearing the roll of tape.

Kentia had always been cool toward me, not unfriendly, other things on her mind, about to enter her sophomore year at Stanford. I could not imagine her in a sweatshirt and Levi's. “I wonder why that is,” said Kentia, her eyes gentle.

Maybe she was just being polite. Maybe she was feeling sorry for me. Perhaps something about the way I looked today made her take a few extra moments before she told her brother I was here.

“My mother doesn't know what to do,” I said. It was impossible to describe the look in my mother's eyes. “She's used to dealing with information, and she doesn't have any.”

“And your dad?”

Dad worried me even more, not getting enough sleep, thinking he could make enough phone calls and tape up enough posters to will Anita home. But I couldn't bring myself to say this, not even to Kentia's dark, warm eyes. “I think they're both doing as well as they can,” I said.