Zero at the Bone

by Michael Cadnum

  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.

  She was only a few hours late. I tried to deny it, but it was out of character for Anita to be away nearly all night. She would spring into the house, with some bright explanation.

  Accidents and doctors didn’t bother Anita, although she once said that everyone should be allowed to take a pain pill before they had a shot. She said her rare visits to Dr. Ames, the dentist, were calming, sitting there looking at the ceiling. One of the few times I had seen Anita really startled was when she nearly stepped on a gopher snake in the backyard, the brown-dappled creature whipping across the dirt and into the weeds.

  Dad put his hand on my shoulder and gave it a squeeze. A good squeeze, like he was feeling the muscle,
the bone. “I’m going to make some oatmeal,” he said.

  My mother didn’t move. She wore the bathrobe Anita had given her the Christmas before. We all called it the spinach-omelette robe, yellow-and-black plaid flannel. Mom had a silver-colored clip in her dark hair. Anita got her blond looks from Dad. I knew it had not been Mom’s idea to get out all the old photos.

  We all jumped a little when a grinding noise erupted from a corner of the sink. Mom had poured the ingredients into the machine before she went to bed, and now the bread maker was following the commands of its internal computer. I found myself wondering if it was making whole wheat or rye. Anita preferred whole wheat.

  I hadn’t wanted to tell my parents about the flat tire the year before, not in every detail. Merriman thought the tire had been slashed. Someone had stuck a blade into the sidewall, but not all the way through—just enough so that twenty miles up the freeway, the Michelin blew.

  Merriman has dark skin, the color of strong coffee. He told me some people didn’t like someone like him driving a brand-new Mercedes. I didn’t see things that way—once a graffiti artist had covered Ziff Furniture with four-letter words. It isn’t always racism or bigotry. Sometimes it’s just mean fun.

  It was as though I wanted to protect my parents from some ugliness in the world. Maybe I was embarrassed for people, knowing that my parents were warmhearted and would not understand cruelty. I felt the same way about an especially bloody fight at school. I just didn’t like to talk about it at home.

  “You know what they kept asking?” Dad said.

  I was supposed to bounce the conversational ball back, and I did. “What did they keep asking?”

  “They kept asking if we had a fight of some kind.”

  I thought it was a pretty good question. But Anita and my dad had never had fights the way the Blankenships did, howled curses and the tinkling, crashing of God-knows-what getting smashed. Our family arguments had been only a little more heated than talk shows on Channel 9, pointed disagreements about whether chickens should be kept in cages or be allowed to range free.

  “They keep suggesting maybe she’s off with a friend,” Dad was saying. “They say maybe she had some reason to be alone.”

  “Things like that happen.” Where did I get this tone in my voice, this sound of reason and calm?

  “Kyle knew,” Mom said, looking straight at the wall.

  Dad had a bottle of Windex out, and a roll of paper towels.

  “Why else,” she said, “would he call and ask to speak to her?”

  Maybe she was with Kyle right now, I thought. Dad squirted Windex on the stove top. “I called Kyle,” Dad said.

  “You called Kyle’s house?” I heard myself say.

  Dad gave a quick nod, a silent sure.

  That was even more dramatic than checking the list of unclaimed bodies with the police. I had to marvel at my father. When he went to battle stations, he went all the way. “You talked to Kyle’s dad?”

  Dad was wiping the top of the stove with the Windex, making it shine. “For a second or two.”

  Kyle’s dad was the most unfriendly person I had ever met. He had made his money selling house trailers. I had never heard him speak a complete sentence. Kyle was tactless and curt, but his dad was like someone who would blow your head off. Plus, he had just had a pig valve put into his heart.

  Mom tilted her head, meaning that she was listening but not about to talk. Dad was addressing her when he added, “Kyle says he doesn’t know anything.”

  “I don’t believe it,” I said, and Mom gave a slow nod, her eyes closed.

  I said, “Kyle knows.”

  “He was very sleepy,” Dad said, as though that proved something.

  “Kyle knows Anita wasn’t telling us everything,” I said. “All this time, shaving a few hours off work to—” To do what young women did with men. I was the one who would shout at Anita when she came home. “He knows who she’s been going out with.”

  “Calm down,” said my dad.

  “I’m going to go get Kyle and drag him over here,” I said. “I want him to sit right here in this kitchen and look me in the eye and tell me he doesn’t know where Anita is.”

  “Relax, Cray,” said my dad from somewhere behind me.

  But I was rushing through the living room, hooking the keys to the Jeep off the plate on the side table with one hand, feeling my eagerness to have somewhere to go, something to do.

  I could picture Kyle telling me he didn’t know anything about Anita, his eyes looking everywhere but right into mine.

  The sky was light blue to the east. A bird fluttered in the bottlebrush plant, chirping.

  All night, I thought.

  She’s been up all night, gone, away. And she never called.

  11

  I flooded the engine.

  I turned the ignition, pumped the gas, and the Jeep gave its hearty rumble, and then gasped. It choked and fell silent, rolling down the driveway a little by its own weight until I yanked on the parking brake.

  Dad climbed into the silent Jeep and sat next to me. I could sense him trying to think of the right thing to say, looking away from me like a passenger enjoying the view—a front porch and an ornamental plum tree. The front garden had been planned by a man with an M.A. in gardening. He had started a company, Green Planet, and we were one of his first customers. No one else had stepping-stones leading up to their garden faucet, the step beside the dripping faucet green with moss.

  “Why don’t we have any normal cars?” I asked.

  He rubbed his hands together like someone who was cold. It was gray but warm, low morning clouds overhead.

  “You don’t have time to do all the work,” I said. I meant that I personally didn’t know enough about cars to replace engine parts, clutch plates, whatever it was that had to be done. I couldn’t help him—he would have to do all the under-the-hood labor himself. And I meant, what was going to happen today, a shipment of nightstands due out or we would never make the deadline.

  “The Jeep is great off-road,” he said.

  We shifted into four-wheel drive about once a year, in the Sierra, near our cabin at Lake Tahoe. The Jeep could drive up and down cliffs, especially in reverse. But it was clear to me that my father liked his cars for reasons that had only a little to do with how they performed.

  “Mom is picking out a picture of Anita,” I said.

  “Just in case they need one,” he said.

  I stared up the street, willing myself to see her. I closed my eyes. Count to three, I told myself, and open them—she’ll be here.

  We got out of the Jeep and went inside.

  We sat in the kitchen, taking turns calling emergency rooms, starting with Kaiser Hospital and Summit, and working down the list. I was surprised how many hospitals there were. They all recognized my sister’s description from my father’s earlier call—long blond hair, gray-blue eyes.

  Some of them were convalescent hospitals, nursing homes. I didn’t call them. But I called every surgery center and twenty-four-hour clinic in Alameda County. She began to sound like a character in a story, Alice in Wonderland, someone pretty but imaginary.

  My dad had already called each hospital two or three times, and by the time I was asking the question the response was sympathetic but a little clipped, and one nurse told me she would call us if there was any word. But there was always a moment or two while the receptionist checked a list, surveyed a list of names, people who were brought in during the last hour.

  The entire house smelled like baking bread.

  For a while, I decided to play a sort of game. The game was: Pretend this is some other day, Anita in bed asleep. I went about a normal routine and took a shower, washing my hair with Breck’s baby shampoo. Anita had pointed out that it didn’t leave gunky conditioner in my hair, and it didn’t make me have to squint and grimace while I went about washing myself, which is supposed to be a pleasant experience.

  As soon as I turned off the water, I could tel
l nothing had changed. The silence felt the same. I opened the door of the bathroom, swirling steam slipping out into the hall, and listened. Dad had a radio on in the room he used as a den, where he kept his books and videotapes. A radio voice talked about the morning traffic, the Dumbarton Bridge closed westbound due to a big rig that had flipped.

  I dried my hair in the doorway to Mom’s room. I almost never walked all the way in. She sat at her desk, her head in her hands.

  Her office is like the headquarters of a successful expedition. At her elbow, beside the computer printer, was the top section of a Neanderthal skull. It was just the bony bowl of the cranium and the brow ridges, the eye sockets only half there. I had always felt the wonder of having such a relic in the house.

  Messages come in on the fax machine, by e-mail, questions from scientists in Boston, New York. My mother is an expert on the East Bay Hills. She is famous among ten people, and they all like to hear from her.

  My mother was at her desk, the way she would be all morning on a usual day. But it was too early, and she was not working. I knocked gently on the door.

  I couldn’t tell if she heard me.

  “Mother?”

  She wasn’t weeping. Weeping would be better than this. She sat looking straight ahead, at the computer, the row of rodent jaws. It struck me how little my family looks at each other. Eye to eye.

  “You want me to help a little later?” I asked.

  “Help,” she said, saying the word like a foreign sound.

  “Screen some sand?”

  “I have about twenty pounds of it,” she said. She turned her head so I could see her profile. She had lost the weight too fast, I thought. Her neck skin was slack. Fossil collectors in the field often collect bone-rich earth by the bucketful. Sometimes I shook dirt through a screen, picking out the tiny ribs and teeth that sifted free.

  “I have to report to Jesse in the afternoon,” I said.

  We were doing really well. Like actors hired to play us in a movie, an early rehearsal, but none of us showing how scared we were. Our remarks didn’t fit together very well, but that didn’t matter. “Derrick won’t be going in to work,” she said.