Zero at the Bone (10 page)

I didn't even let myself think her name. I didn't even let myself picture her face clearly in my mind, I thought of it with deliberate vagueness—by the time I get home, there will be good news.

16

The Blankenships had been the first house on our street to order crushed white gravel. A small mountain of it had occupied their driveway for a couple of weeks. It wasn't simply white—it sparkled. The crushed quartz was spread by Mr. Blankenship himself, forming a bright white path that circled his lawn. Other neighbors decided that white gravel was a brilliant idea, and in the following months more dump trucks of glittering rock rolled up our street.

Now the Blankenships' gravel was scattering, bare places in the path. A strange type of weed grew in the midst of the gravel, a flat, spreading plant, looking like great green cow pies against the dazzling white. And the gravel found its way far from where it was supposed to be. I kicked a piece of gravel ahead of me, one great kick sending it all the way down the street. The closer I came to my house, the harder my pulse beat.

As soon as I saw my own house, I knew. I went sick-cold.

A blue van was angled up the driveway, right behind the Jeep. The van had KTVU all over it, big white letters, on the sides, on the back. Dad knows a few television people, serving on committees with TV-and radio-station owners. I could imagine him on the telephone, convincing one of his friends that this was a hot story.

But now I couldn't argue with the feeling I had. Dad was right. I stood in the living room, near the coffee plant, trying to hear what was going on in my dad's den. Whatever was happening, it was almost over. A pretty Asian woman with a startling amount of makeup came out of the den smiling, reaching for a briefcase a man was carrying.

I had seen this woman on television, and was surprised how young she looked, young and brightly colored, her face full of pinks of various shades, her eyes carefully outlined. She was wearing a dark blue jacket, and I remember thinking how amazingly pretty she looked, only a few years older than myself. Not sexy and not beautiful—someone you wanted to look at and never stop.

She had an assistant, a man who could have been the fire marshal's brother, one of those hard-looking men with steady eyes. The cameraman had baggy pants with about nine extra pockets and a blue T-shirt with
MICHIGAN
across the chest, yellow lettering. The T-shirt had shrunk with use, and his arms stuck down from the shortened sleeves. He swung the tiny video cam from a strap.

I tried to judge from what was being said—and not said—what had happened.

Dad saw me but did not give me any sign except for an open-eyed expression I knew was supposed to communicate something. He walked his visitors down the front steps. He was talking about property tax. He said a special assessment had paid for the sidewalks in this part of Oakland. I did not mistake this patter for anything but filler talk, the chatter Dad keeps up because he can't keep quiet. He worked the talk around to streetlights, and then to crime, what he had been talking about all along even when he changed the subject a little, working around to the only thing that was really on his mind.

Mom came to my room. I had fled there. That was the only word for it. I saw these television people, their easy, relaxed faces, walking off with a news story about my sister, and I could not stand to talk to anyone.

I didn't mean to hide from the world. Sometimes, just like my mother, I need a few minutes to myself.

She sat next to me on the bed. She put her two hands together, her right hand over her left, so the wedding ring showed through her fingers as she massaged her knuckles, her fingers, taking some time out from talking. Dad's voice reached us from downstairs, his words muffled but his tone carrying through the floor from wherever he was in the house, portable phone to his ear.

“I can't look at it,” Mom said at last. She was wearing a lab smock, a white coat. The pockets made a crumpling sound, a noise I recognized, typical of my mother under stress.

She put a small book into my hands, Anita's diary. It fell open to the same page I had seen the day before. The handwriting in her diary was so hurried, or so cramped with feeling, that I could almost convince myself it was not hers. But it was. The bottom half of one page was a single word, “Blisters,” written in tall, scraggly letters. And beneath it, five exclamation points. She had bought a new pair of shoes for hiking and the right shoe had tortured her. A few nights ago she had sat watching television, putting Band-Aids on bright pink sores on her foot, the room smelling of disinfectant.

“Please,” she said. “Please read it and tell me.”

“The handwriting is a little messy,” I said.

She gave a quick little nod. That was what we would both pretend—that Mom had trouble figuring out Anita's penmanship.

“There wasn't any news,” I said, not asking, making it sound like an announcement.

“No,” she said. “No news.”

I really hated the posters on the walls, supernovas and interstellar gas, the kind that glows purple by the time the sight of it reaches Earth. I had no interest in any of it. In another year I would be out of high school, and I had no plans. It struck me as I sat there with my mother weeping. She was trying not to, making the bed tremble. I would have to decide what college I would go to. And what I would major in—I would have to think about that, too. Not right away—not today, not this week.

But I was letting weeks slip by without thinking that I had a future. I sat beside my mother and read Anita's diary, from the first, neatly printed entries from almost a year ago to the bounding, energetic writing of the night I had seen her tending one of her blisters.

Anita indicated a break in time with a row of dots, small circles, six of them. Never five or seven. Six tidy circles that meant she had not written anything for a while. Sometimes a week had gone by, sometimes three. The time skipped was indicated by the same set of symbols, six dots.

I still thought that Anita might bound up the stairs, but I no longer felt I had to have an explanation ready. I could take as long as I wanted, turning the pages beside my mother, who fell still and silent. I trusted her quiet more than my father's chatter.

If an archaeologist discovered this journal centuries from now, brushed away the dust, and translated the scribbles, he would conclude that it was written by a young woman with no other human beings in her life. There was no mention of any of us. Kyle's name appeared once—“Kyle thinks so, too.”

It was a book of lists, mostly. Books she had read, books she wanted to read, movies she liked, movies she hated. Then the lists grew complicated, branching into arguments, why one author should not have killed herself, why she dreamed she was trapped in a movie about a recluse who found a human tooth in a hole in the wall of his dining room.

The summer before, Anita had begun reading biographies. She read about women who wrote books and poems, women who painted, sang the blues, ruled empires. She began to read diaries, the journals of famous people, writers who would start an entry, “The sun came out by afternoon after spits and spots of rain,” and end by writing that there was no God.

I could see Anita trying to sound like one of these people, how the sunlight slanted through the cedars in the Blankenships' front yard. I could see her trying to be someone she was not. Not sounding false so much as empty, keeping herself out of the pages and letting someone else in, someone who had never heard of Mom's fossil collection or the way I could throw a football forty yards off a scissor kick.

“Is there anything?” my mother asked when I closed the book.

For a moment I could not speak, almost blaming Anita for whatever had happened.

17

I put the diary in the top drawer of my dresser. I would be able to say I had taken good care of it.

Downstairs, I stirred some tuna into some tomato soup. The soup had some nonfat milk stirred into it first, and when it starts to simmer, the recipe calls for two cans of tuna. I don't like using the kind packed with spring water; it reminds me of what we sometimes feed Bronto.

There was a knock at the front door. Dad had a brief conversation in the doorway, and I heard the crackle of money, and that flat silence of cash being counted out. He hustled back into the kitchen with a large package wrapped in brown paper.

He began peeling open the wrapping before I could warn him. I had fragmentary mental warnings, too hideous to think: kidnappers sometimes sent body parts of their victims. But Dad was eager, confident, whisking away the last of the paper.

He stopped ripping paper and stared, putting his hands on his hips. “I didn't know it would be that color,” he said.

“It looks fine,” said Mother.

“I picked it out,” he corrected himself, “but I didn't know it would look so awful.”

“It looks good,” I said.

“Do you really think so?” he asked hopefully.

When my dad gets into a mood like this, he has to be reassured. There were five flimsy boxes, electric blue sheets of my sister's graduation picture reproduced in black and white. At the top border was the word: Missing. At the bottom of the sheet was another black word: Reward.

Smaller lettering gave the Oakland Police Department telephone numbers, and our number, along with a description of Anita and a phrase that hit me:
last seen near MacArthur BART station at approx. 8:00
P
.
M
. It added further information, and I wondered which of Anita's acquaintances at the shelving company had volunteered so much.

The phrase bothered me. Even the abbreviation for
approximately
didn't look right. Anita deserved a more dignified poster, not something thrown together in such haste. Her picture looked more unreal than ever reproduced on this shade of blue. And besides—when she came home she would look at all this and tell us what a waste of paper it was, and how polluting the dye would be, deposited in landfill.

“The manager at Copymat suggested goldenrod,” Dad said. “That's a kind of orange yellow,” he added, making a face to show what he thought of orange yellow.

“What color is this supposed to be?” I heard myself ask.

“It's called Florida blue,” he said. “I just stood there looking at reams of paper. Lime green, circus pink. And all I could think of was that satin dress she wore to the banquet when I got that award.”

He had been Bay Area Businessperson of the Year, and the mayor had given him a wooden plaque with a brass plate. Dad had given a very funny speech, and we were all proud. It was the first time in my life I had ever worn a tux, rented, all except for the shoes, at Selix. We had all felt happy, and joined in giving Dad a standing ovation. Anita had worn a shiny blue dress, Florida blue, more or less.

“Two thousand five hundred of them,” he said. “I'll swing by the office, grab some staplers. Not furniture staplers, the standard office kind. You probably want to hit each one with a stapler in each corner, so we're looking at ten thousand staples.”

Mom and I did not say anything, but Dad responded as though we had. “That's not as many as it sounds. A box of Bostitch standard staples holds five thousand, a little box the size of a chalkboard eraser. Two boxes like that and we're all set.”

The pot behind me sputtered. Little specks of tomato and tuna appeared on the stovetop. I spooned the steaming stuff out onto slices of toast. The bread from the machine toasted well, but in odd shapes, not like the loaves from the store. The edges burned, and sometimes a corner that stuck out of the toaster stayed pale, not browning.

“It'll take half a minute to staple each poster,” I said. “Not counting time spent finding a telephone pole to fasten each one onto—”

“And bulletin boards at libraries. And Safeways. We're going to plaster the Bay Area.” He didn't like the way I had said
telephone pole
, making the words sound absurd.

I thought that hunting all over the East Bay for wooden poles would do very little to help Anita. Some neighborhoods didn't have telephone poles at all, only streetlights. Streetlight poles were made out of shiny metal or cast concrete. To affix posters to those we would need masking tape. “You put up posters like that for missing pets,” I said. “If Bronto gets lost, we put up a blue poster.”

“Bronto isn't the issue,” said Mom.

“Reward.” I didn't like that, either. It made her look like a fugitive.

Anita would have sprinkled some Kraft Parmesan cheese over each serving, and so I did, too. I could see why chefs at Denny's always add a sprig of parsley. The food looked bare and not very appetizing. It was dark out, early evening. I deliberately didn't look at the clock.

“The poster is great,” I said. “That blue will get attention.” Anyone could tell I was trying to be diplomatic, and having trouble.

Dad shifted the poster onto the floor with quick, sharp movements. His feelings were hurt.

“We can pass them out at BART stations,” I said. “Put one up at every school in the Bay Area. And clinics.”

“Sure,” Dad said, very quietly.

I put out a fork and spoon for each of us, and a folded paper napkin. Dad heard out my report on the fire inspector without comment. I asked if I should go up on the roof the next morning to double-check the hopper and make sure it was empty of sawdust. He just stared down at his plate as though he did not recognize food.

Mother looked sideways at what I put before her. Her lab coat pockets were bulging with candy wrappers, and a brown and green Milky Way wrapper lay at her feet, crumpled. She was probably not hungry, but she found the spoon without looking at, and ate holding the bowl under her chin, sitting sideways like someone not completely committed to sitting where she was.

“We're not behind yet,” Dad said. “We shipped out thirty-five today. We keep shipping, we'll be okay.” Nightstands. He could still think about nightstands.