Zero at the Bone (6 page)

“The Oakland Police Department suggested it,” said my mom, sounding overly calm, someone reading lines from a book. She didn't have to tell me. Anita wasn't home yet.

“It's only one o'clock,” I said. “She's late.” I meant: She's been late before. That wasn't quite true. She was rarely this late.

“That's right,” she said, not looking at me. “She must have gone somewhere with Kyle.”

Anita always called when she was even a few minutes late. Anita was impatient with the rest of us, but she played by a certain set of rules: Write letters, make phone calls, don't eat any more red meat than you have to.

I wondered if there had been an accident, one of the trains derailing. Sometimes someone jumps onto the tracks on purpose or by accident, the electric third rail cooking them stiff. These were my thoughts, but I heard my dad say, “The OPD says she hasn't been gone long enough for us to file a missing persons report. But they took her description anyway, because of her age.”

“She's only running a little behind,” Mom said, like someone referring to a train schedule. “God knows I was late all the time,” she said, looking off to one side, like she could see herself twenty years ago. “I bet I took years off my dad's life,” she said, without much sadness, but philosophically, puzzled by historical fact.

Anita worked near the MacArthur BART station. She would travel past the Nineteenth Street Station, Twelfth Street, Lake Merritt, and get off at Fruitvale. She would take the bus up into the hills. Dad had hated the plan, because of all the street crime, but she had found the job on her own and was even joining a union.

“Maybe she made some new friends,” Mom was saying. “They stopped by after work.”

Stopped by for a drink, she meant, or a cup of coffee. That didn't sound like Anita. The legal drinking age is twenty-one, although Anita could pass for older in bad light. Anita drank coffee a little, after dinner at a nice restaurant. But she made friends slowly, like me. Maybe she was changing. But this sounded like a fantasy that belonged to Mom's vision of the world, not Anita's.

Mom had friends, went out, drank caffe lattes in San Francisco. Anita was always in a hurry somewhere, running her fingers through her hair or giving it a toss to swing it out of her eyes.

“She was supposed be home at ten,” Dad said. He did not look sleepy, and he had combed his hair. He was dressed in slacks and a fresh shirt, but he was barefooted, like me.

“It's very inconsiderate,” said Mom, not looking at either of us.

“What's the name of her manager?” Dad asked both of us. This was a word out of Dad's way of life: manager. If you needed help, you talked to the person in charge.

I gave him a look, a shake of my head: I don't know.

“I get an answering machine,” said Dad. “I call American Shelf and Filing and I get a machine to talk to.” He said this like it was an outrage he was bearing with as much patience he could muster.

“It's good they have an answering machine,” I said. “The phone could just keep on ringing. You wouldn't like that.” Maybe I was taking Anita's part, without thinking much about it. “Paula stays out to three sometimes.” I said it like this—not
till
three. Maybe I was signaling to everyone by speaking a little clumsily that I didn't know what I was talking about.

My mother turned her head in my direction.

Paula had claimed to have stayed out with guys with motorcycles and Romanian accents, including one man years older than Paula who built skyscrapers, driving rivets. His favorite expression was “Don't look down,” in a foreign language I had never heard of.

“Last year I didn't get home until two-thirty that time,” I said.

“I remember,” said Mom, giving her words special weight.

“You both go to bed,” Dad said.

Mom started to speak and he shook his head, and that was all anyone could say.

“I wasn't home until almost three o'clock that time,” I said.

“You got on the phone,” said Dad. “Oliver had a flat tire, and you called us twice, telling us you were okay.” Merriman and I had gone to San Jose to see a hockey game, and it took us half an hour just to find the jack.

I had always wondered when Anita would do something like this. I had been expecting it in the back of my mind. Someday, I had come to believe, she would stay up all night and come home drunk. Or too happy, eyes bright with what Dad always referred to as Some Sort of Drug. As in: I think some of the people in the finishing room are on Some Sort of Drug.

She had gotten good grades, except in math, returned her library books on time, learned to drive in about half an hour one Saturday afternoon. She had been too good, in the way kids are said to be good kids. It was time. Anita had finally decided to have a wild night, and I couldn't really blame her.

But my parent's tenseness ate at me, even when I went back up to my room. I wanted Anita to come home, say she was sorry, give a normal excuse, and then we could all go to bed, after Dad got over his speech about responsibilty, fumed a little, paced around for a while, and finally gave her a hug.

And I was afraid in a part of me that could not hear my own inner lecture. I lay down in the dark and tried to trust my parents to deal with this. I tried to trust Anita, too. She had kept her own address book since she was thirteen. Computers, Spanish verbs—it all came easily to her.

So I knew she would be all right.

9

An engine started up outside, a beefy rumble.

It was still dark out. I got up in time to see Dad's white Jeep veer out of the driveway. Gears clanked. The two headlights illuminated the sprawling junipers in the front yard while Dad pumped the clutch, trying to shift. Our front yard was in good shape. A man from Green Planet Garden Service dropped by to touch it up once a week. Round stepping-stones led out into the middle of the lawn.

We have three cars, a twelve-cylinder Jaguar, a vintage MG, and the noisy Jeep. Each car is fun, and each has something wrong with it. We have money—a cabin at Tahoe, raw land on the north coast. But my dad's life is crammed with projects.

As Dad found first gear and accelerated, I caught a glimpse of his profile, portable telephone held to his ear. I could picture my dad following his plan, step by step. First, visit the place where Anita worked. There would be a night crew, security guards. Maybe Anita was still there, so involved in her work she couldn't turn her head to look at the clock.

Then he would cruise the BART station. After that he would follow the route home, checking out the bus stop, driving the short distance from the bus stop here, stopping every now and then to peer.

Sometimes when I came home late from football practice, he had been just getting into the Jeep, really annoyed, or standing at the curb with his hands on his hips. In some families I had the feeling you could vanish for most of the night and no one would ever ask. Around here we kept schedules.

I could hear the Jeep all the way down Lincoln, past Head-Royce School, the clutch slipping whenever Dad had to accelerate out of a full stop. It was a surprise to me he never got a ticket for having such a decrepit muffler.

I imagined seeing what he did as he drove: parked cars, empty streets. I imagined how Anita would look when the headlights caught her, marching, half-embarrassed to be so late.

I think I slept.

When I woke up I felt around for the clock, thinking I still had that old clock, Felix the Cat with clock hands on his face and an old-fashioned alarm bell. An alarm like that makes you wake up with your heart pounding, and that was how I felt now. No alarm had gone off. There was only silence. I kept the Felix the Cat clock in the bottom drawer. It was a joke between Anita and me, how scary cartoon figures would be if you saw them in real life.

I had not heard the Jeep come back, and I thought, now they are both lost somewhere.

But the white Jeep was parked in the driveway, swung hard to one side, engine off, headlights dark. So it was all right, I told myself.

Lamps were still bright downstairs. I was a little ashamed—I had made up my mind to stay awake, but I had missed the drama between Dad and Anita, Mom as referee.

I tugged on my pants again. My digital clock showed 4:15, and the clock is a little slow. Almost time to get up and go running. If I was going to play this fall, I would have to build my stamina.

But I had no intention of running. Football didn't matter to me now. I listened at my bedroom door. He was talking. He was down in the kitchen, and he was on the phone. I found myself down the stairs and in the kitchen before I was aware of taking any steps. Something about his tone brought me downstairs in a rush, and I waited for his words to make sense to me.

Mom sat, looking blank, in a chair that didn't belong in the kitchen, a gray wicker chair from my parent's bedroom. This out-of-place furniture bothered me, a sign of disorder. She had a big notebook open in her lap. I knew what it was, but I didn't like to think about why it was there.

The kitchen had a warm, yeasty smell, and the timer light, a little red dot, showed that dough was rising in the bread machine.

“She told us she was helping with inventory,” Dad said into the phone.

It was one of those frustrating moments when I think my parents are out of their depth, like children.

Dad flicked his eyes at me, walking back and forth, wiping the sink with a sponge, wiping the kitchen table as he talked.

“She never worked that late,” he said with a flat tone, repeating what someone was telling him.

The telephone made its faint squawking sound, and I tried to make the distant voice into words, a sentence, and I almost could: No, Anita had not been working until nine-thirty for the last week. Never later than seven or seven-thirty.

These were almost the exact words. I could tell by the pauses, the spurts of speech, translating them into a message that made me cold.

When Dad was off the phone, he sat down at the kitchen table, only to get up again and shift the sponge to its usual place, behind the faucet. “I went to the police,” he said.

I didn't say anything.

“Just finding out what the procedure was,” he said. It was like he could read my mind. He didn't look me in the eye, his voice quiet and steady. He was wearing the belt Anita had give him on Father's Day, just weeks before. It was an expensive glove-leather belt with a solid brass buckle.

“You talked to her manager?” I asked.

“I woke him up,” he said. “I looked through my files. It turns out we both served on that Save the Bay panel a couple of years ago.” Some businesspeople and some activists had joined together to tell the governor that the perch being caught in the South Bay were too toxic. My dad belonged to twenty different committees, heading most of them.

“She was always so smart,” said Mom. She said this with a tone of admiration, nearly. She had that book of snapshots, a photo album, open in her lap. “When she comes home, I don't want you to yell, Derrick.”

I knew how my mother's mind worked. Anita was seeing somebody. That was the way Mom would phrase it to herself. She would not say she was dating somebody none of us knew, or that she was having sex maybe even now, out there in the world.

I can't think like this. When I do, I put it out my mind—the thought of my sister being like other females in her private life.

“She can't do this,” he said, but his voice was under control. He meant she couldn't do to this to him, and to Mom. And maybe I was included, too, in his sense of quiet outrage.

He nodded after a moment, as though her words had finally hit him. He silently agreed—no yelling. But I also knew he was treating her absence as a rebellious act, something between Dad and daughter. We all knew that was the most hopeful way to look at it. But that wasn't why he had gone to the police station.

I visualized Anita in my mind seeing somebody. I thought of it like that: a man standing on a corner, a shadowy figure, Anita seeing him, running toward him, waving, in a hurry. A lover. It was romantic, out of a movie, autumn leaves and rainy streets.

An affair. I had seen those paperbacks in her book bag, behind the National Geographic videos and the hardbacks on veterinary science—half-naked aristocrats with muscles. They wrapped their arms around the governess, the young American visitor, the high school senior from Oakland.

“There weren't any reports,” I said. I did not make it sound like a question. I meant: no reports of accidents. Car crashes. Or shootings. No rapes, no kidnappings.

“I even had them check the morgue,” Dad said.

10

That proved it—he was quiet, to look at, but close to his own personal brand of hysteria. He had been down practically looking at all the people who had died since ten o'clock. My father was in a quiet panic, and Anita was going to clump through the door any second.

“You both go back to bed,” Dad said.

“You went all the way down to the police station and asked about dead bodies?” I asked, double-checking, hoping that maybe he would laugh a little and admit that was going too far. My mind works like this sometimes, circling back like a sniffing dog.

“Sure.”

The police headquarters in Oakland is miles away, almost to the Bay, a boxy, businesslike building. It was near a freeway, a double-decker highway that had partly collapsed in an earthquake. It was my father's favorite sort of neighborhood, warehouses and the kind of restaurant that specializes in quick lunches. I could imagine the police being very nice to him, not telling him that he was just another overwrought parent. In a small way I was thankful that Dad had gone so far down his own mental checklist.

“What did they say?” I asked. I didn't like the way my voice sounded, years younger. It was also a painful question. What I really meant was, What could they do? And how many people had died that night? If we were all going to go crazy, let's do it together, I thought. I found it reassuring, too. Anita was alive and well.