Zero at the Bone (19 page)

I went dry inside, solid, all the way through. We weren't going to see Detective Waterman, and despite my complicated feelings for the detective, I wanted to see her, a familiar face in this building of blank walls. I could see the wrinkles in my dad's face, the gray sheen of my mother's.

We shook hands with Mr. Wallace, taking a long time about it, my mother first, then my dad, then me. Even then, moving in little jerks, hardly able to stand upright, we went through the motions of behaving as though we knew what to do.

There was something dainty about the way the cororner perched on the edge of his chair, “What we have here is a young woman discovered five meters from a county road.” A dash of white at his temples, a single white hair in one eyebrow. This man had just been inside looking at a dead body.

My mother handed him the red folder. He cleared his throat, opened the folder, and continued speaking. “It was among trees up near Redwood Park, and I must tell you we need to be very careful.”

I couldn't help the way my mind worked. I couldn't help wondering why they had to be careful, like the body might blow up. I took my mother's arm. It was wooden, heavy, my mother staring at the coroner's knee.

“In these particular circumstances, fingerprints are not an option,” said the coroner. He studied the X rays as he spoke. Then he reached into his breast pocket and shook out a pair of glasses.

My mother said, “I will identify the body.”

My father turned and put his hand over hers.

“I'll do it,” she said, quietly.

“I don't think that will be necessary, Mrs. Buchanan,” said the coroner.

And then he left us alone, my mother beside me, trembling, but not crying, burying her face in a Kleenex like someone seeing how long she could hold her breath.

“There's some water,” said the woman behind glass.

It was an Arrowhead Springs bottle and a dispenser, with a metal cylinder and paper cups. I tugged the bottom cup, and another cup fell immediately into place, ready for the next thirsty person. I tried to think like this, step by step.

I plunged the handle and the paper cup filled with cold water. It was more than cold—it was very nearly ice. A bubble burned up from within the glass urn of water. I gave the cup to my mother, who did not see it until some of it pattered onto the floor, and then she drank.

32

They were turned toward each other, what they weren't saying between them like a package they were protecting, invisible but easy to break. I put my foot out idly, as though I found the floor fascinating, into a faded place in the tile where they must have had a potted plant, but an artificial one. There were no windows.

Fear turns into a numb fever after a while. But that makes it more bearable. Just as the wait was beginning to paralyze us so we couldn't feel anything, the door to the inside opened.

Detective Waterman looked like her own sister, someone less sure of herself, a wrinkle down either side of her mouth. “They are going to take just a few minutes,” she said.

“A few minutes,” said my mother in a quiet, determined voice.

Detective Waterman buttoned her sweater, her blouse hanging out under the fisherman's knit. So it wasn't just me, I thought. It
was
cold in here.

“They don't do anything quickly in this place,” said Detective Waterman, making a polite expression of pain to show that she cared. I wondered if that was how the English teacher Detective Waterman would have acted if she had to tell Senior English their term papers fell into the swimming pool.

Her hand searched for the doorknob. The blouse hanging down beneath the sweater was pink, a smock bunched against her body by the sweater. I wondered if Detective Waterman might be pregnant. “But I'll go see if I can't speed them up a little.” She didn't move, maybe waiting for us to excuse her.

“What kind of clothes was the body wearing?” said my mother, keeping her voice strong. You could hardly guess her feelings.

“There were no clothes.” The detective paused for a split second, a little wrinkle of pain. “Sometimes when they search downhill later on, they find clothes.”

“Earrings,” said my mother. Anita had gotten her ears pierced when she was thirteen. My father hated the idea of pierced ears; my mother thought it was inevitable. A shop on Union Square in San Francisco did the hole-punching while I looked on, women with long sparkling fingernails saying what a wide range of choices Anita would have.

“There's no apparent jewelry,” said the detective.

My mother and I could take a sifter and a tub and go up to Skyline. If there was a turquoise stud up there, we would find it.

I thought my mother was going to ask whether the lobes were pierced, but I thought: skunks, rats. Maybe coyotes. I knew why they couldn't simply take fingerprints. Mentally I begged my mother to stop asking.

We were alone.

My father was out of his chair, touching the doorknob, listening against the interior door.

The woman behind the chicken-wire glass leaned way over, trying to see him, but he was out of her range of vision. My father's voice sounded detached from what he was doing, pacing crazily, lunging to test the door again. “We'll start a new chapter of Find the Children,” he said. “Focus on kids from the Bay Area. We'll have the faces of these kids on billboards, BART, everywhere. People won't be able to go out for a dozen eggs without seeing them.”

This was typical of my dad. He never ate eggs, hated them. But he thought of other people, normal people, as being unlike him in subtle ways, not caring about cholesterol. I had always thought my father assumed he was more competent than most people, but was nice about it, feeling it made him all the more responsible for what happened.

Gradually the woman behind the glass got used to him and didn't bother watching him as he paced. “We'll make it impossible for people to forget. Physically impossible.”

Detective Waterman had trouble getting into the room, and my father helped her, holding the door. She was carrying Anita's X rays, black comic strips.

“It's not Anita,” said the detective.

But her statement was canceled by the sound of the door gasping as it swung back, the entire building full of heavy doors that wouldn't open and wouldn't shut.

“There is no question,” said Detective Waterman, her voice rising a little. “It's someone else.”

I waited, not wanting to be relieved too soon.

“I personally,” said my mother, “want to verify that whoever you have in that room is not my daughter.”

That froze everyone. “I'm sorry I brought you all the way down here,” said the detective.

My grandmother makes the same bitter smile, wise to everything. “I want to see the body,” said my mother.

Dad put his hand out, to her shoulder. He gave his head a small shake, left, right, looking hard into her eyes.

Detective Waterman had trouble yanking a paper cup from the dispenser. “Anita had very good teeth,” she said.

“Fluoride,” said my dad. “It's putting dentists out of business.” That's what he was saying. But I knew what he felt.

Detective Waterman did not drink, just watched it sloshing around the small paper cup. “The body we recovered has extensive dental work.”

“So,” my mother said.

We all waited.

“She can't be Anita,” said my mother at last.

I put my arm around her. Her feelings were inside, a hive.

“It was a good idea for you to have them on file,” said the detective, her voice husky. “It saved some time.”

“It's because I know how hard it is,” said my mother softly after a long silence. She spent a lot of time being patient with people. “If you find something. Sometimes you don't know what it is.”

It was almost dark outside, the neon coroner's light stuttering on, all the neon tubing bright except for the
r
at the end. The air was warm, and sounds were too loud, car doors slamming, a motorcycle puttering by in the street.

“When did you get her dental records?” said my father.

“A few days after it happened,” she said. She didn't get into the Jeep, just leaned against it as another coroner's van squeezed past, its yellow light flashing

“I wish you'd told me,” he said, on his side of the Jeep, toying with the keys as though he found them intriguing. “It's like—”

“What's it like, Derrick?” she asked. “You, mean it was like I was losing hope?”

My dad didn't say anything.

We all got into the Jeep, and Dad backed it all the way out into the street and up to the intersection before he remembered to turn on the headlights. And then he had to pull over to the side of the street and wait for his composure to come back.

It was full darkness, stoplights and car lights bright, but far off, nothing real. We were all the way up Lincoln Avenue when I saw them, the red police flashers. I said, “Dad, how fast are we going?” as a hint.

He said, “Oh, Christ,” and pulled over to the curb.

The police car parked right where I could get an eyeful of flashing red.

Dad got his driver's license out and the cop took it, shining his light on it, the size of a pen with a bright ray illuminating the cop's wedding ring, my dad's profile. “When were you thinking of taking care of that muffler?” the cop asked.

“I got used to that racket,” said my dad, sounding tired but perky. “Didn't even hear it after a while.”

The cop looked at the license, a brilliant white slip in his pink fingers, the flashlight so bright.

“I could hear you four blocks away,” said the cop.

“This is undeniably possible,” said my dad.

The cop was thinking, heavy, cube-shaped cop thoughts. He pointed the light in at my mother, back at me. “You haven't by any chance been drinking, Mr. Buchanan?”

I should have waited. Because then he straightened a little, maybe recalling the name, making sense of who we were, but it was too late.

I was out of the back of the Jeep, around the cab, face-to-face with the cop, and telling him he should know who these people were.

The cop putting his fingers on my chest, all ten of them, trying to push me away without putting any strength into it, my dad saying, “Cray, get back in the car.”

That night I could hear my mother, locked in the bathroom next to my parent's bedroom. She was talking to Anita, as though Anita were there in the house, asking Anita where she was.

33

We drove up to Lake Tahoe to shut up our cabin for the winter.

That wasn't the only reason. There was something we had to check again for ourselves.

We had an easy ride, new muffler and new seat cushions, and Dad had them put an all-weather shell over the vehicle, enclosing it so I didn't feel like a prisoner of war sitting in the back watching the traffic on Interstate 80. I told myself I had liked it better before, strapped in and hanging on.

But I liked it better this way, the Jeep almost like a family car now. It was early October, and my parents sat in the front seat listening to Stanford get slaughtered by the University of Arizona while I stared down the receding lanes of traffic, the floodplain of the Yolo Causeway, empty and stripped of crops this time of year, Sacramento, off-ramps and motels, and then the foothills, oak trees twisting out of the rocky slopes. All the way looking backward, not getting drowsy for even a moment, until by near sunset we were whipping along the Sierra two-lane, a margin of a little snow on either side of the road, patches under the pines.

We had not visited all summer. We had paid only one visit that year, during Easter week for one night, shaking out the hammock, sweeping the spiders out of the kitchen, Anita telling us that an exoskeleton wouldn't mend like human bones.

The doctor had said my dad was about to have a blooming ulcer again. That's the way Dr. Pollock expressed himself, according to my father. “Blooming ulcer,” like a British cop in a black-and-white movie, an old codger sipping tea, the blooming rainy weather, the blooming Jerries, dropping bombs all over London. But we knew what the doctor meant, how the secret sore might open up, like a flower. Ever since the evening at the coroner's bureau, and the eventual news that the body was a young woman from Portland, Oregon, we had been needing to go somewhere far from home.

When Dad found first gear, the new clutch like a miracle, we jackrabbited up the drive, over the boulders barely submerged under the pine needles, and I was the first one out of the car, into air that was still warm, a little summer returning before winter came for good.

We had hoped, only half aware of it.

We needed to be sure. The sheriff's department had checked the cabin right after we reported Anita gone, and periodically over the last three months they had continued to drop by the place.

Once we had come up to find signs of a break-in, the bottle of Wild Turkey Dad had kept under the sink empty and abandoned on the back porch, the denim shirts, hiking boots, and lumberjack shirts rifled, but nothing missing.

I unlocked the cabin door with a key of my own, and let the door swing inward.

The cabin was exactly as all four of us had left it, the cans of mushroom soup unopened, the extra long wooden fireplace matches, the yellowing want ads under a splintery chunk of wood, the amber red sap that had leaked out of the firewood last March grown white and stiff.

My dad marched across the room and grabbed the phone there by the breakfast bar, taking a seat on the stool and calling up the answering machine. He didn't bother telling us what the messages were, just listened, licking his lips, all of us breathing a little hard.

“I can see why mountain climbers carry oxygen,” puffed my mother, the seven thousand feet of altitude hitting her especially. “I see spots,” she said. “In front of my eyes.” She waved her hand, parting gnats, except that there was nothing there.