Zero at the Bone (8 page)

I sat on the bed. Anita's graduation picture was on a far shelf. It didn't really look like her. There was a school district rule for those photos—everyone had to wear the same sweater, a similar pearl necklace. I was going to have my own graduation portrait snapped in a few weeks, a jacket and tie, “preferably a dark tie and a gray-to-dark jacket, navy blue allowable.”

I don't know who sets this kind of policy. But the result is that graduates, photographed almost a full year before, look a little bit like strangers, people smiling while they hold their breath. Here was this richly colored portrait of Anita, her chin down, her eyes steady, the mandatory smile. She had worn jeans to the photographer's, and paint-spattered tennis shoes without laces, well-dressed only from the waist up.

When the pictures came in the mail, in those stiff cardboard, do-not-bend envelopes, she had threatened to burn them. As a joke. I think she liked the one we all picked out. And I wondered if this is how Anita might look to a stranger, a lecher in a passing car, someone who didn't even know her name.

Every time I looked at the clock, I could not believe how slowly time passed.

When the phone rang, someone snatched it eagerly, but it was always only Anita's boss or Jesse, reassuring Dad but having to call him four times between six-thirty and eight forty-five to get straight on what had to be done with the hopper, when the fire inspector was coming.

“Until she comes home,” my dad said, concluding each phone call. He's almost the only person I know who doesn't say good-bye when he hangs up. He ends phone calls like someone in a movie, just dropping the receiver.

“Kyle is coming by,” said Dad after another phone call.

“Kyle is coming to tell us what he knows,” I said. “He changed his mind. Decided to be helpful.” I had changed my mind about wanting to see Kyle. I didn't want to see him, and I did not want Kyle here. My family was wounded, tired, and I didn't want to see Kyle's hard little eyes.

Kyle was probably stopping by to amuse himself. His own life was too boring. I knew we had always seemed colorful to him, everyone always in a rush. Nobody hurried in Kyle's family.

“He just said he wanted to share the worry,” said Dad. “He'll be by as soon as he drives his dad back from an appointment with his doctor.”

“I don't want to see him,” I said.

Dad didn't seem to hear me. He paged through the address book. He had called several people, interrupting breakfasts, finding that people had already left for work. It was harder than calling hospitals.

Usually the person he called knew who my dad was, but he didn't know them, so there was a friendly, cheerful aspect to the call, talk about the weather, the lack of rain. What made it worse, my dad said more than once, laughing too energetically into the phone, was that all this worry might be totally unnecessary. She might be home any second.

I had a bad thought, revolving around the words you hear in the news, “beyond recognition.” Maybe she had been in a fire, and her body had burned so badly it didn't look like her.

So I tried to have some other mental pictures—Anita on a ferry on the Bay, empty champagne glass in her hand. Anita sleeping off a wild party, innocently, curled up on a sofa, no head for alcohol. Anita waking and this very moment fumbling in her purse, finding coins, making the phone call.

Breathless, full of apologies.

We had all forgotten it. Only I remembered, and set the baked bread on the sink. It was honey brown, and still a little warm when I cupped my hands around it and really felt what was there.

When there was a knock at the front door, I knew it was Anita, too embarrassed to pop right in, too guilty to run all the way upstairs to pee or take off some clothes that she couldn't stand anymore, too tight, too hot.

It was a woman I didn't recognize, and a car parked at the curb, one of those light green, almost colorless sedans. She gave me a card like a salesperson, a business card imprinted with the familiar oak-tree silhouette. But she didn't work for the school district. I gave the card a good look but still had trouble reading the words. I didn't have to; I knew what she was.

I thought that maybe this is how the news might come. If something terrible happened. If they found her, and the news was not good. The woman in a dark blue skirt and matching jacket asked to speak with Mr. or Mrs. Buchanan.

I let her in.

13

A man in a suit stepped in behind her, smelling of coffee and aftershave.

Her card gave her name as Detective DeAnne Waterman, from the Juvenile Division of the Oakland Police. Detective Waterman had long hair pulled back into a soft bun at the back of her head. There were two white streaks in her hair, the sort of lightning strikes some women have added in the beauty parlor.

The detective did not make any remark to me beyond asking to speak to my parents. I invited her to sit down, and she did, but on one of the blue wicker chairs people rarely used. She had a briefcase under her arm, a black bag with a shoulder strap. Her eyes were kind, dark, and I tried to read her mind by looking into them. She wasn't talking, but she was thinking, giving me a reassuring smile.

She waited to speak to my parents, and the man who was with her sat in my dad's favorite easy chair, leaning forward. He was quiet the way a Seeing Eye dog is, an important shadow. He had tiny pockmarks all over his cheeks. Both visitors were on edge, like they were going to start a footrace right there in the living room.

“Nice plants,” said the man with the pinholes all over his face.

“I really admire someone with a green thumb,” said Detective Waterman, both cops ready to play a game of Small Talk. She asked me my name and I told her. “The plants belong to my mother,” I said as I went to get Dad.

My dad had heard them come in. He hurried to finish a phone call, and as soon as he hung up, he looked at my feet, afraid to catch my expression. “What did they say?”

I wanted to tell them all that it was too early to have the police sitting around in the dining room. I wanted to tell them everything he had done up to now was way too fast.

We all needed to slow down. I had the feeling we could punch a rewind button or pull the plug on the machine that made all the clocks run forward. Anita would be here, with something she had found, an old license plate she thought Dad would like, or a lizard skin, like the one she found last summer, like a plastic cutout with four legs.

I wanted to say all this, but all I said was, “They just want you and Mom.” I couldn't bring myself to make another sound. This might be it, I knew. This might be the news my mother and dad had been afraid of since Anita was born. It was the news I was afraid of whenever my dad was late coming home, whenever my mom's plane was delayed.

I also wanted to add that they were both calm, nice.
Nice
is an important word. I like quiet, soft-voiced people. I did not feel they were here with bad news, but I could not be sure. Maybe they had especially pleasant cops deliver very bad news.

Dad left me, hurrying into the living room. One of the strands of my mother's coffee plant draped over Detective Waterman's shoulder.

“There's no news about your daughter,” said Detective Waterman, a tiny drop of water from the leaves soaking into her jacket.

My mother appeared at the top of the stairs. “There's no news,” my father repeated, to my mother, to all of us. It was almost wonderful—no bad news. And then the tiredness came back all over again.

My mother had put on a dress she never wore, something with a sash, a sea green cloth that looked all wrong this time of day. No one can change her appearance as dramatically as my mother. Most of the time she looks like a frumpy ranch hand, someone who could shoot a buffalo in her spinach-omelette bathrobe. Now she looked like a weary hostess. She extended her hand and thanked them for coming over, like they were new neighbors.

“Missing Persons and Juvenile work hand in hand,” said Detective Waterman. “On weekends we work out of the same office.” She said this just as she took my mother's hand, as if the two of them were acting out a skit, “The Inner Workings of the Oakland Police.”

It was not a weekend, I wanted to say. It was Friday.

They all followed my father into his den. There was a table over to one side, covered with photos of Anita.

My dad's den is a room of shelves and books, a television only he watches, a small Sony perched on a pile of old magazines. The wall is decorated with maps of faraway islands, atolls, and reefs.

I didn't like the man with the pinprick holes in his face. He looked at me from over by the maple accent table, an item Ziff used to make until earlier that year. The cop looked at me again after a few moments, keeping his finger on a picture of Anita on her seventeenth birthday. She was wearing a sweatshirt and cutoff Levi's. I had been in charge of the camera that day. The picture was a little blurred, the camera strap a fuzzy gray caterpillar at one corner of the photo.

I couldn't stop myself from having this thought: I could match myself against this man physically and win. He was muscled under his poly-blend suit jacket and probably knew some police academy choke holds. But if I put a shoulder into him, he would go down.

Right in the middle of this thought, the cop gave me a smile. The little holes in his face closed up when he showed his teeth, his eyes warm, and I felt how mistaken I was. I felt how jagged I was inside, shaky, nothing fitting together. Detective Waterman glanced my way and she smiled, too. She was pretty in a no-nonsense way. It bothered me, how badly my mood matched what was really happening, two police here to help my family.

“I took a lot of those pictures,” I said.

I was ashamed at the quality of the photos. I can take a good picture, with a little luck. My camera work was betraying Anita, making her look like someone she wasn't. I imagined Detective Waterman going around to motels with one of my snapshots. Did you see anyone who looked like this? she would ask. And the motel clerk would say no, even though Anita was sleeping in room 9 that very minute.

“What do
you
think?” asked Detective Waterman, looking right at me. I tried to imagine her with her hair wet down to her shoulders, telling her hairdresser, “I want lightning bolts, one on either side of my head.” “Can you think of a reason Anita didn't come home last night?”

I shook my head, the way someone does at supper when his mouth is full and he can't answer right away. But it was feeling that kept me from talking for a moment. Detective Waterman clicked her pen, a gold ballpoint

“I think she's all right,” I said. My voice was ragged. “I think she's with someone.”

“Do you think,” asked Detective Waterman, “maybe she decided to leave—and not come back?”

“She needed a life of her own,” said my mother, like someone reading the title of a story in a magazine. The pain in her voice hurt me.

Some routine places should be checked, my dad said. The land up in Mendocino, the cabin at Tahoe. A local park ranger or sheriff could pay a visit to those places, my dad was saying, trying to calm us down by sounding in control. Detective Waterman made a note and said, “I'll follow up on that.”

“She left a new pair of pants,” I said. “Folded on the chair.”

I had their attention. They needed me to complete my thought. I said, “She'll be here any minute.”

It was natural for Kyle to make his entrance then. He knocked, but the front door had been left open, and his knock was a faraway noise that didn't catch anyone's attention.

His voice reached us from somewhere in the living room, all the way inside the house. “Hello?”

My dad looked up sharply and my mother didn't seem to hear a sound. Dad made a motion with his head, meaning, Go see what he wants.

I closed the door to the den firmly behind me. As I left I heard Detective Waterman ask how much Anita weighed.

I greeted Kyle and told him there wasn't any news. I asked if he would like to sit down, and he sat.

“It's ten-thirty,” he said.

I wanted to argue that it wasn't that late in the morning, but the antique clock in the corner agreed with Kyle.

I hadn't eaten anything since last night's lasagna. “Would you like some toast?” I asked.

“No,” said Kyle.

“How about some orange juice?” I suggested.

“No.”

“I can warm up a Pop-Tart,” I said.

“I ate,” said Kyle.

Sometimes I would play a private game, offer him cold drinks, hot drinks, snacks, waiting for him to say “No, thank you.” He would just get a certain stiffness to his head and shoulders, resenting each offer a little more. If I happened to mention something he would like, he never said “please.” It was always, “I'll have some of that.”

“I'm going to make myself some toast,” I said.

“Something must have happened to her,” said Kyle.

14

I asked him what he knew, who Anita's new boyfriend was, and his eyes just got smaller than they already were. Kyle looks like a handsome enough guy who has lived his whole life in a tunnel underground. I knew what Anita saw in him, a project, someone to make strong and healthy. She believed in animal rights, and Kyle was a kind of animal.

“I can't help you,” said Kyle.

Maybe if your dad is a silent, mean person you never learn to use sentences. Kyle took calculus and had a watch with a beeper that was always going off at odd times, to remind him of duties he never explained. He talked like someone with his jaw wired.

“Anita has a lot of energy,” I said. I meant: sexual energy as well as all the other kinds.

Kyle nodded, once, a quick up-down of the chin.

“There had to be some other guy,” I said. I wanted to point out that Anita was a young woman with plans. Kyle, with his heroin-addict looks, was hardly going to please Anita when she found out how smart she really was.