Zero at the Bone (11 page)

He got up slowly, and took his time getting over to the sink. He was wearing a V-neck undershirt and dress slacks with a nice crease. The shirt and pants did not look good together, the pants expensive and new, the shirt the sort of thing he wears around the house, torn under one armpit.

“I'm not really worried about another fire,” I said. I felt a little guilty for even raising the possibility of a further anxiety in his life. “I'm just thinking.”

“That's good,” said my father. His glasses were off and his eyes blinked at me, not seeing me very well. There were permanent little indentations on the bridge of his nose where his glasses rested, twin little footprints, one on each side of his nose. He did something I rarely saw him do: He washed his glasses off at the sink, using soap and Palmolive dish soap and a big soft linen dish towel, a map of the Counties of Ireland.

“That's smart, Cray,” my dad said, not really noticing what he was saying. “You keep thinking.”

The phone rang again. It never stopped for more than five or ten minutes. My mother's parents had already called twice from Iowa; my dad's parents had both died when I was too little to remember. Each time the phone rang there was a surge of emotion in me, in all of us.

18

Dad answered the phone. There was always a hitch in his voice, a hesitation; this might be the call.

“It'll be on the ten o'clock news,” he told someone. Not
she'll
be on.
It
. Anita had become a subject, a story.

He listened to the voice in his ear, nodding as though whoever it was could see the expression on his face. “I talked them into it. I had to push a little, explain that she was an honor student, still only seventeen.” He was bragging about the influence he had with the television station. I didn't really blame him.

I didn't even ask who it was. These were Dad's telephone friends, people he talked to on the phone. Some days he could sit and talk for three hours to one person after another. He had called all of Anita's friends, taking his time with each one, checking off names on a list. Sometimes it seemed like he could have a better conversation with people he couldn't see.

When the phone rang later, as I was putting the dishes in the dishwasher, it was a surprise. Dad handed me the black portable phone he liked to carry in his pocket. “It's for you,” he said, with just a trace of annoyance. He was nice about it, but you could tell that social calls to me were something he didn't consider very important right now.

“Cray, I have been here for hours.” People like to say my name, starting sentences with it. I knew who it was and I felt myself go stupid. “I have waited one hundred years,” said Paula.

“Christ, what time is it?”

“Almost ten,” she said.

“I forgot.” Dish soap all over my hands, dissolved foam running down the phone. I had not given her a thought all day. I didn't care very much, either. Maybe I wouldn't see Paula anymore after this. “There was a family emergency.”

“I was experimenting. Deliberately not calling you. Seeing how late you'd be before you picked up the phone.”

Still, Paula was a friend. “I'm sorry.”

“This is how you really are, Cray. Wherever you are, that's all you think about. I almost admire it.” She was ready to shift from impatience to anger. “You don't think anybody else is alive out here.”

“It was an emergency,” I said, giving the final word special emphasis. “It still is. I'm sorry.”

I didn't want to talk about Anita. Saying her name seemed like it might be bad luck. The sound of her name might break whatever calm we were able to keep.

I think Paula didn't take my family especially seriously. She has one cousin who is a surgeon, and another in prison. She never came out and said it, but I think she thought my parents were hard to figure out, even a little amusing, wrapped up in their projects. But my tone stopped her.

“I can't talk right now,” I said.

Paula sighed. It was a theatrical sigh, forgiving, dismissing. But I was a little impressed with Paula. She had enough sense to say good night and hang up.

My mother sat at the table, looking at one of Dad's lists, or maybe a letter he was going to send to the newspapers. She had a pencil in her hand. When she saw something on the list she didn't like, she circled it. It was their mailing list, a computer printout they used at Christmas, everyone they knew.

Dad brought one of the portable televisions from upstairs and set it on the sink next to the bread machine.

What was Mother doing, I wondered, proceeding in her silent, methodical way? I could guess. Following Dad's urgings, sending Anita's image to everyone who lived within two thousand miles. Or even farther, to Dad's buyers in Eastern Europe, his designer friends in Japan.

Channel Two's Award Winning Ten O'clock News went on for an hour, ten to eleven, dragging in news from around the world to add to whatever was happening locally. I couldn't look at it. I went out into the back garden, that frontier of things my dad hadn't gotten around to yet.

Oakland, and the flecks of light descending toward the airport in South San Francisco, seemed to appear just as I looked, as though the world had been blank and dark one moment before I turned my head. In a few minutes it would be known, in every corner of the Bay Area and beyond.

When a player suits up for football he puts on a cup over his genitals, a mouthpiece between his teeth. Some players like the mouthpiece so much they carry it around with them, popping it in during math test, a transparent plastic smile that exactly fits the mouth. When it was all put together for the first time, helmet with its cage over the face, shoulder pads, thigh and hip pads, I felt wonderful. Even in the gray practice jersey with
HOOVER HIGH
stenciled on crooked, a ratty gray shirt that barely stretched down to cover my belly button, all I wanted to do was fall down.

I ran down to the thirty-yard line, down to the twenty, and threw myself on the ground, laughing, rolling, leaping up and doing it again. Even when the jayvee coach, Mr. Ernest, called, “Buchanan, get your behind over here,” in his raspy little voice, I kept spilling, spinning, slamming off the goalposts, ramming into the other players. It was a wonderful feeling—nothing could hurt me.

Dad could have gotten sued for having all this equipment lying around, sledgehammer, post-hole digger covered with a tarp. What if a tax assessor or a PG&E man came back here, someone wandering in to read the gas meter, and he fell over the rusty wheelbarrow?

Was it over yet, I wondered? Was her face and her name all over the place by now? For the first time I felt myself lose control, out there in the dark, my sister's name, her face, broadcast all over Northern California.

I went to bed.

I listened to music for a while, finding stations that never broadcast any news. I used to fall asleep listening to music almost every night and wake hours later with my earphones still feeding me tunes.

I gave up and turned off the radio and lay there knowing that I would not fall asleep, that it was useless to try.

But I did sleep, a little. Sometimes when I woke I got out of bed and stood at the top of the stairs. I could not see my parents from there, but I could tell where they were. My mother's lab coat was folded and perched on the magazine stand. Dad had presented it to her as a gentle joke—my wife, the scientist. But she liked wearing it while she watered her plants, or sat in the kitchen writing letters.

She was asleep on the sofa, a box of Kleenex just beyond reach. The kitchen light was bright, and a dim shadow on the living room carpet was my father, head on his arms at the kitchen table. I don't think he slept much. The shadow kept moving as he straightened his back, slurped some coffee, put his head down again for a little rest.

He didn't drink coffee as much as he used to. He took Tagamet for his ulcer, and was supposed to eat five or six small meals a day. Listening to him sip coffee could be annoying. He sucked it in, a long inward whistle, followed by a slurp. He didn't drink orange juice or milk like that—only coffee.

I dreamed about her. She thumped her way up the stairs and demanded to know how her room got so messed up. She called my name. She was already losing her anger. She wanted me to say something. And I would, as soon as I could rouse myself from this deep sleep. It was not like a dream at all. Only when I woke did I feel the falseness of it.

The Anita of the dream was the Anita of several years before, when she had had such a bad sunburn. Her shoulders had peeled all the while we were at Lake Tahoe, little pink freckles breaking out all over her nose.

When morning arrived, gray light filling the bedroom, I slipped out of bed and got the diary out of the top drawer.

I had not wanted to remember the last words Anita had said to me, the evening before she vanished. Both of us were sitting on the sofa, the television off, Anita watching me search for the remote on the coffee table, pawing through magazines. We both saw it at the same time, the remote with all its tiny buttons lying on the floor beside the coffee plant.

It was late, Mom and Dad both upstairs, and we looked at each other, Anita giving one of her smiles, sly, in on one of life's jokes. “Things move around when you aren't looking,” she said. She had a voice that was ready to take on any emotion, her voice colored just then with amusement and even affection.

“On legs,” I had said. And she had made her fingers walk along the sofa, a slow, good-humored spider.

Was that the last thing she had said to me? Hadn't I said something in return, and hadn't I walked over to the television and turned it on? One more word. She must have said something else. I could only remember Anita stretching, elaborately, taking more pleasure in it than any cat. And then she went upstairs.

I sat there in my bedroom with her diary. I turned the pages slowly, giving each page a hard look, searching. In all these pages, she was pretending to be someone else. There were quotations in the diary, almost all poems I recognized from reading I had done for English, Emily Dickinson. Anita's handwriting became especially neat when she copied out these lines. Her own words looked hasty, pressed into the page.

Some of the lines she quoted made me stop and reread, not liking what I was thinking. Three pages away from the last entry, I read: “The soul selects her own society, / Then shuts the door.”

Beneath the lines from the poem: “Tonight. Again.”

19

I found my mother in her office. Bronto was sitting in a chair next to her, and for a moment it looked as though the cat was giving her advice. Mom had opened several Jiffy bags, and the padding from the bags scattered over her desktop, gray dust. A stack of new books rested on her desk, new geology textbooks and magazines as thick as books with lists of articles on the cover.

I'm a different person early in the morning. Smells are brighter, sounds are cleaner. I can't get a grip on things, though, fumbling, slow but hypersensitive. I hate to go running early in the day because it's twice as much work, dragging my body before it wants to go.

Mom had a cup of coffee, a crust of what had been a turkey sandwich. It was like a morning weeks before this one, before any of this had happened. She carefully whisked the bread crumbs into her trash can with the side of her hand.

I showed her Anita's diary, opened it before her on the desk. She did not look at it for more than a moment, gave it one stony glance and looked away. She asked what I had found. Bronto stretched his neck and chewed on a corner of the diary, experimentally. I gave the cat a gentle push and he landed on the floor, looking serene.

She was hoping she would not have to read it herself, but I didn't say anything. She turned and looked at the page open before her. She lifted her shoulders and let them fall.

Then she read the two words, leaning on her elbows, taking as long as she would have taken with a beefy paragraph.

I showed her other passages I had overlooked at first. The word “tonight,” circled, at the top of one page. “I promised” at the bottom of another page. Her real life, her actual feelings, exploded on the page only in tight little bursts. It was easy not to see them at all on first reading.

“So?”

I hate that. A person can give a whole presentation, logical and eloquent, and a bored listener can wipe out the entire argument by saying, “So?”

Besides, I could see the dishonesty in my mother's posture. She was pretending she didn't get my point, but she did. “There was something going on in her life.”

My mother closed her eyes. Maybe she was going to cry again. Maybe she was going to shriek. I was nervous for a moment, not able to judge her mood. “You have to know Anita,” I said, very gently.

“She was always thinking,” said my mother at last.

I was a little relieved. She was in control of her feelings. That was easier for both of us. “She had a friend none of us knew about,” I said.

“I wonder if I really understood her,” she said. She gave a silent, sad laugh, shaking her head, quiet bitterness it hurt me to see.

I wanted to say: she had a lover. There was a romance in her life. The only phrases I could think of were words Anita would have chosen, bookish but magical.

“A friend,” said my mother in a flat, emotionless tone.

“A man,” I said. Saying it like that I had to imagine this man, this shadowy figure with a penis.

“A man she wouldn't tell us about,” she said, not agreeing with me, just letting me know she was paying attention.

That sounded bad. Anita was so frank with her opinions. The man would have to be someone she knew none of us would like or approve of. Someone almost frightening, I thought, someone who would convince her to hide from her family.

“Do you think I should call Detective Waterman?”

“Detective Waterman is very busy,” she said, in a tone of mild scorn.