I realized this was an earlier Anita, an Anita of a couple of years ago. Actually, wearing the shirt had been a challenge. People in malls had trouble giving the right change, having to count out the coins carefully with a dead wildebeest sticking out at them.
That was another feature of the T-shirt. It was a little too small for her, shrinking even when she used Woolite and cold water in the bathroom sink. For the first time I realized how grown Anita was getting—how full-figured, I mean. She did not have unusually big breasts, but I knew how men would see her, whisking her hair out of her eyes, sexy inside her dead-animal shirt.
It was the next day, morning, and the house was quiet. The bedroom light was still on, pale and useless in the daylight.
I didn’t have to look—I knew Mother was still in bed, not asleep, just staying there. If Dad is in the house, the place feels different, something shifting, moving around, restless in some corner.
The house was still. I entered Anita’s room and I had to murmur a silent apology, like a prayer. The T-shirt was still there, hung in her closet so long the neck hole was oblong. Mother must have seen how the closet was full of clothes, nothing missing.
The dresser was easy, waltzing it out into the middle of the room. The carpet where it had been was scored with the outline. The drawers came out, and I unpacked each one gently, underthings and pearl-button denims, frilly see-throughs and Nike terry-cloth sweatbands folded together. My mother’s search had left key rings and wooden birdcalls tangled together.
I laid the dresser flat and felt along the unvarnished wood and the single, empty husk of a moth cocoon. The bed was not so easy, the headboard askew as I gave it a nudge. Every bed is a kit, slotted together, even a bed that has stood glued together in one place for years will fall apart if you nudge it the right way. I was very careful, turning over the mattress, feeling the undersides of the rails, feeling under the bedposts, turning over the mattress.
When I was done, I put it all together, carefully putting back the books Mother had left lying on the floor, making the bed three times, starting over, working slowly, getting it right, so in the end all the sheets were smooth, each blanket even, the coverlet perfectly straight, and turned down, welcoming.
I don’t know when it became routine, when I gave up thinking each creak was Anita bounding up the front step.
Maybe it was that morning, Sunday, after an hour in Anita’s room. I came downstairs to see my dad’s oatmeal bowl already rinsed and upside down in the drainer, a stiff wire rack that holds the dishes upside down so they dry without being dried off with a towel. The pot was there, too, dripping a little bit onto the sink top. Dad usually likes old-fashioned Quaker Oats, cooked slow, with brown sugar on top.
Maybe as I sat there waiting for the toaster to pop, I remembered the dreams I had spent the night with, Anita in every single dream, talking. Sitting in the kitchen, lounging in the living room, laughing. Just being herself. Usually my dreams are strange and impossible, flying high above the neighborhood, or visiting strange places and experiencing the impossible feeling I’ve come home. The dreams about Anita were like reality.
Dad had left one of his legal-yellow pads on the kitchen table, beside the turkey saltshaker, a bird with holes in his back where the seasoning shakes out. “I’ve gone out with some posters,” read the note.
The pile of blue posters was crooked, and I straightened them up so they wouldn’t fall over. The answering machine had eighteen messages in its memory, but I didn’t play any of them.
I think that Sunday was the day we began to avoid each other, not out of annoyance, but because we reminded each other that Anita was not there.
I spent most of the day up in Montclair, on the other side of the freeway. I walked—Dad had taken the Jeep, and it would take a degree in auto engineering to get the other cars rolling. Montclair is a district of Oakland with stone walls covered by ivy. The streets have more trees than our neighborhood, bushy pines and redwoods. There were houses like the one I taped a poster in front of, on the bus stop bench, a cute brown house with yellow shutters, a Mercedes parked in front because the Porsche and the speedboat filled the garage.
I ran out of tape very early, stripping the roll down to a bare cylinder of cardboard. I bought a new roll of masking tape and continued, taping the posters to streetlights, a ragged strip on the top margin, and a matching one on the bottom. Sometimes I went into a Laundromat or a convenience store and showed them the poster.
The owners always gave permission, and if it was only a clerk, they said the owner wouldn’t mind. One man asked if he could have a few for his church study group; they liked to lend a hand to deserving causes. The owner of a Laundromat said I should leave a stack over by the magazines. So many people were friendly in a kind, quiet way, impersonal, like people when they see someone being strapped into a stretcher, curious and pained and a little embarrassed.
The only way to carry a big roll of masking tape for most of the day is to put it on like a bracelet. It was awkward, and sometimes I saw one of the posters fluttering away in the wind, or passed one I had put up an hour before and found it torn, not by accident. People walk around, and if they see something a little unusual, they just idly reach out and give it a rip.
Only one person confronted me. It was in a latte house, where people sit to read the Sunday Chronicle and drink big coffee drinks with milk whipped into white foam. Anita had said the culture was a little hypocritical about drug addiction. She didn’t sneer when she said this, she just raised the point, meaning we should be forgiving of people with drug problems. She said nearly everyone over the edge of sixteen was a caffeine addict, but I liked the smell of coffee more than the taste.
I didn’t want to cover someone else’s posters, used computers for sale, guitar lessons, so I taped Anita to the bottom frame of the bulletin board, putting just a kiss of tape on the bottom, so it adhered to the wall.
I heard the man yelling and I didn’t bother to look. People yell sometimes. It usually has nothing to do with me.
“You will not leave that stuck to the wall,” said a loud, piercing voice. It emphasized the words in a searing singsong.
I turned, in no hurry.
“Take it off the wall,” said the man behind the bran muffins, a thick-necked man with black bushy eyebrows.
He had a point, in a way. Maybe the shop had just been painted. Masking tape could stick to the fresh ugly green and peel away a little scab. He had a good point. No doubt the system was that new messages were supposed to cover the old ones, until after a while there was a layer, weeks of lost cats and French cooking lessons.
But I didn’t like everyone turning to look at me over their movie reviews. It was only half a room full, plus a few people at the round white metal tables outside, but every person was rolling eyes in my direction. I strolled over to the bulletin board and taped another poster right next to the first one.
I knew when I did it I was being childish. But not like a little child. Like a big one, someone about my size. I wanted him to come over and rip down one of those posters. I wanted him to edge past me and take hold of one right where it said Missing. And give it a tug.
The poster didn’t say how much the reward was. It might not even be a good idea, I thought, watching the man with the eyebrows whisk off his apron. People were going to call up with fake hints, fishing for a piece of the reward. Maybe they would hope to get lucky. They might call up and say they saw her getting into a lavender Cadillac, or maybe pink, and it would turn out later that was the car the cops found abandoned at the airport.
Mr. Eyebrows slowed down as he approached me, eyeing the posters. He slowed way down, and stopped. He had a towel in one fist. I couldn’t believe what he was saying.
He repeated it.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
He added, “I didn’t have my glasses on.”
24
Kentia opened the door. Before now there had always been a polite smile, cool, few words
between us. Now she spoke. “Come on in, Cray,” she said.
Merriman’s sister held the door open for me, standing aside, and I felt hulking and clumsy, even though I had put on a clean shirt and a new pair of pants. It was the sort of long-sleeved shirt I usually unbutton, roll up the sleeves, until after an hour or two the tails are out and I look like someone who has been doing somersaults. But I was all tucked in, pausing in a living room glittering with antique silver and dark, polished wood.
“I am sorry to hear about your sister,” said Kentia.
I thanked her. I knew enough about wood to recognize mahogany. Bookshelves, table, a framed mirror. And I knew enough about furniture to recognize the custom-made leather sofa and side chairs, glittering brass tack heads. Every time I came here, they had new furniture.
“How are your parents managing?” she asked.
It was Sunday afternoon, and I had barely spoken to either of my parents all day. I had come home, still wearing the masking tape on my wrist, and changed clothes for my visit with the Merrimans.
“My mother is doing better than my dad,” I said. I thought about my mother for a moment. Was this true? And what power did Kentia have, to make me blurt out such frank comments about my family? I couldn’t keep myself from feeling my wrist, making sure I still wasn’t wearing the roll of tape.
Kentia had always been cool toward me, not unfriendly, other things on her mind, about to enter her sophomore year at Stanford. I could not imagine her in a sweatshirt and Levi’s. “I wonder why that is,” said Kentia, her eyes gentle.
Maybe she was just being polite. Maybe she was feeling sorry for me. Perhaps something about the way I looked today made her take a few extra moments before she told her brother I was here.
“My mother doesn’t know what to do,” I said. It was impossible to describe the look in my mother’s eyes. “She’s used to dealing with information, and she doesn’t have any.”
“And your dad?”
Dad worried me even more, not getting enough sleep, thinking he could make enough phone calls and tape up enough posters to will Anita home. But I couldn’t bring myself to say this, not even to Kentia’s dark, warm eyes. “I think they’re both doing as well as they can,” I said.
I could juggle five oranges at once. I could cut a cartwheel around the living room and never break a single plate on the shelves beside the silver candlesticks. But around Kentia’s slender presence, I felt like a large, poorly trained horse.
“And how are you doing?” she asked.
That proved it. She was just being kind. She had no real interest in me. But I appreciated her effort. It was easy for her, in a way. She had a soft voice and steady eyes, calm. She was peaceful inside, used to talking to graduate students and professors. But I knew she did not have to take these few extra seconds, books open on the floor beside a laptop computer with its bright screen.
Sometimes a person asks, and you sense the importance. It was a chance to share a part of myself. Her father was an executive with Clorox, something in the legal department. While he and my father were friendly, the contrast was always there, my father’s glasses always glazed with sawdust. It brought out my loyalty, suddenly. I felt I had said something unfair about my parents, although I could not guess what.
“I’m doing pretty well,” I said, missing my chance.
She knew it. There was just a tiny shift in her eyes. I was no longer being honest. I was just talking, being social. Was I mistaken, or was she a little disappointed? “What can we do?” she asked.
Maybe she meant: What can any of us do, in a world like this. Maybe she was being philosophical. But I thought she was asking what she, Kentia Merriman, could do to help my family, to help find my sister.
“I always thought Anita was someone who could keep a secret,” said Merriman.
“She was always honest about how she felt,” I said, my voice suddenly thin, scratchy.
“Honest, no question,” he said, hesitating, knowing how painful the subject was. “It’s just that I thought she could have a life nobody knew about.”
I couldn’t talk for a moment.
Merriman sat with one leg stretched out an a leather stool. His arms were folded. Maybe I shouldn’t have asked, but I had to know. Besides, I had to change the subject. I indicated his foot with my eyes and asked, “How did it happen?”
Merriman looked at my own feet, my own black loafers. We were sitting on the Merriman patio, at the edge of the patio, before us a perfect green lawn.
“I had this pistol,” said Merriman.
“An automatic,” I said. I knew all this, but I was trying to push the conversation ahead.
He used to be the kind of friend you just sat around with. Now he seemed to want to talk. I had noticed this on the telephone, and I noticed it even more now. I didn’t know Merriman the way he was now.
“Those twenty-two-caliber bullets,” said Merriman. “They look so small. You could hold twenty of them in your fist, like this.” He closed his hand around an imaginary handful.
“They didn’t put your foot in a cast?”
Merriman shrugged: cast, splint, what was the difference? He had his foot in a sort of sandal, something you would never wear to the beach, canvas and plastic. Only the crutches leaning against the potted cactus proved how badly injured he was.
“You didn’t know the gun was loaded?” I asked. I hated myself, but I couldn’t let the subject go.
“You know, if there is any kind of a gunshot wound you have to talk to the police,” said Merriman.
“They ask a lot of questions,” I said. I stopped myself. The line was something out of a movie, a television show. I had the dim memory of a dozen bad scripts, one bad guy complaining to another that the cops were asking around.
Merriman and I both seemed to recognize this. We smiled at each other.
“Are you going to play football?” he asked.
The question surprised me. Merriman was not assuming anything. He knew how different everything was for my family, and for me, until Anita came home again.
“I don’t think I could have talked both my parents into signing the form anyway,” I said.
Maybe I expected an argument from Merriman, encouragement, or criticism. He had talked his dad into buying him a black Mazda sports car, a convertible, so he wouldn’t have to drive the family Mercedes anymore.
“It’s only a game,” said Merriman. I knew he didn’t completely believe this. People had always talked about the Rose Bowl when they mentioned Oliver Merriman. They talked about the AFC and the NFC.
“That’s right,” I said. “And people would just say that I wasn’t as good at the slant pass as Oliver Merriman. I couldn’t live up to that.”
“You’d be as good as I ever was,” said Merriman, and suddenly he sounded much older, a mature man, an uncle, giving me advice in a dreamy tone. Maybe being injured makes a person feel old for a few weeks, makes him wise until the pain wears off. “I could tell, Cray. I watched those jayvee games, how you had a touch on the football. Not too hard, not too soft. You were about to flower.”
And he put it in the past tense.
“I’ll tell you how I shot myself,” he said.
25
Detective Waterman was late. I leaned on my elbows in the coffee shop in downtown Oakland, feeling out of place. Men in dark business suits plodded in carrying folders and briefcases, and women with tired eyes eased into chairs, slipping off their shoes under the table where they thought no one could see.
Detective Waterman was suddenly across from me, snapping her own briefcase shut. She noticed my surprise at her sudden appearance and smiled with her eyes. “There’s a back entrance,” she said. “I always park on Franklin, zip up an alley. A shortcut.”
I felt into the big manila envelope and brought out the pile of papers, the photocopies of Anita’s journal. I had overscored some of the words with yellow marker. It took a few minutes. I let Detective Waterman find these phrases herself, and
waited while she leafed through the loose pages, then stacked them against the tabletop to keep them straight.
“We’ve interviewed her fellow employees,” she said at last. “They were all very generous with their time. They work people pretty hard at American Shelf and Filing. It’s one of two American Shelf plants in the country,” she said. “The other one’s in Toledo, Ohio.”
She gave me another smile, trusting her smile, knowing it had power, the white streaks in her hair catching the fluorescent light. “Her boss was very helpful. Showed us her workstation, let us sift through all the inventories she’d been doing. The security service, American Protection, has someone on-site twenty-four hours a day. We questioned their staff, looked through their logs for suspicious vehicles, loiterers. Almost every business has a problem in that neighborhood, having to ask someone in a sleeping bag to move aside when they open the office in the morning.”
I nodded, just to show that I was listening. I was a little impatient. Anita did not run off with someone who slept on the sidewalk.
“We got a list of her friends from your father. He called all them already, of course. She was in the French club, played tennis. It’s been a slow process, driving out to see each of them. I hate interviewing people by phone.”
“It would save time.”
“How would they know I’m a real cop?” she said. “I could be a crank, calling up to be a pain in the ass. I could be the perpetrator, calling up to intimidate. Besides, people can lie over the phone better than they can when I’m looking at them.”
I liked this, a detective referring to herself as a cop, saying pain in the ass. She was being open, taking a little extra trouble.
“But I’m surprised there aren’t more friends,” she said. “Anita is such an active, bright young woman.”
“We are both slow at getting to know people,” I said. “We’re friendly, but not that close to our fellow citizens.” I phrased it this way to make it easier to say, like a joke. I didn’t like this, feeling defensive about our choice of friends. “The French club didn’t sit around speaking French. They corresponded with French students, took a group of people from Avignon down to Disneyland. Anita liked to go places.”
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