Zero at the Bone

by Michael Cadnum

  I waited, not wanting to be relieved too soon.

  “I personally,” said my mother, “want to verify that whoever you have in that room is not my daughter.”

  That froze everyone. “I’m sorry I brought you all the way down here,” said the detective.

  My grandmother makes the same bitter smile, wise to everything. “I want to see the body,” said my mother.

  Dad put his hand out, to her shoulder. He gave his head a small shake, left, right, looking hard into her eyes.

  Detective Waterman had trouble yanking a paper cup from the dispenser. “Anita had very good teeth,” she said.

  “Fluoride,” said my dad. “It’s putting dentists out of business.” That’s what he was saying. But I knew what he felt.

  Detective Waterman did not drink, just watched it sloshing around the small paper cup. “The body we recovered has extensive dental work.”

  “So,” my mother said.

  We all waited.

  “She can’t be Anita,” said my mother at last.

  I put my arm around her. Her feelings were inside, a hive.

  “It was a good idea for you to have them on file,” said the detective, her voice husky. “It saved some time.”

  “It’s because I know how hard it is,” said my mother softly after a long silence. She spent a lot of time being patient with people. “If you find something. Sometimes you don’t know what it is.”

  It was almost dark outside, the neon coroner’s light stuttering on, all the neon tubing bright except for the r at the end. The air was warm, and sounds were too loud, car doors slamming, a motorcycle puttering by in the street.

  “When did you get her dental records?” said my father.

  “A few days after it happened,” she said. She didn’t get into the Jeep, just leaned against it as another coroner’s van squeezed past, its yellow light flashing

  “I wish you’d told me,” he said, on his side of the Jeep, toying with the keys as though he found them intriguing. “It’s like—”

  “What’s it like, Derrick?” she asked. “You, mean it was like I was losing hope?”

  My dad didn’t say anything.

  We all got into the Jeep, and Dad backed it all the way out into the street and up to the intersection before he remembered to turn on the headlights. And then he had to pull over to the side of the street and wait for his composure to come back.

  It was full darkness, stoplights and car lights bright, but far off, nothing real. We were all the way up Lincoln Avenue when I saw them, the red police flashers. I said, “Dad, how fast are we going?” as a hint.

  He said, “Oh, Christ,” and pulled over to the curb.

  The police car parked right where I could get an eyeful of flashing red.

  Dad got his driver’s license out and the cop took it, shining his light on it, the size of a pen with a bright ray illuminating the cop’s wedding ring, my dad’s profile. “When were you thinking of taking care of that muffler?” the cop asked.

  “I got used to that racket,” said my dad, sounding tired but perky. “Didn’t even hear it after a while.”

  The cop looked at the license, a brilliant white slip in his pink fingers, the flashlight so bright.

  “I could hear you four blocks away,” said the cop.

  “This is undeniably possible,” said my dad.

  The cop was thinking, heavy, cube-shaped cop thoughts. He pointed the light in at my mother, back at me. “You haven’t by any chance been drinking, Mr. Buchanan?”

  I should have waited. Because then he straightened a little, maybe recalling the name, making sense of who we were, but it was too late.

  I was out of the back of the Jeep, around the cab, face-to-face with the cop, and telling him he should know who these people were.

  The cop putting his fingers on my chest, all ten of them, trying to push me away without putting any strength into it, my dad saying, “Cray, get back in the car.”

  That night I could hear my mother, locked in the bathroom next to my parent’s bedroom. She was talking to Anita, as though Anita were there in the house, asking Anita where she was.

  33

  We drove up to Lake Tahoe to shut up our cabin for the winter.

  That wasn’t the only reason. There was something we had to check again for ourselves.

  We had an easy ride, new muffler and new seat cushions, and Dad had them put an all-weather shell over the vehicle, enclosing it so I didn’t feel like a prisoner of war sitting in the back watching the traffic on Interstate 80. I told myself I had liked it better before, strapped in and hanging on.

  But I liked it better this way, the Jeep almost like a family car now. It was early October, and my parents sat in the front seat listening to Stanford get slaughtered by the University of Arizona while I stared down the receding lanes of traffic, the floodplain of the Yolo Causeway, empty and stripped of crops this time of year, Sacramento, off-ramps and motels, and then the foothills, oak trees twisting out of the rocky slopes. All the way looking backward, not getting drowsy for even a moment, until by near sunset we were whipping along the Sierra two-lane, a margin of a little snow on either side of the road, patches under the pines.

  We had not visited all summer. We had paid only one visit that year, during Easter week for one night, shaking out the hammock, sweeping the spiders out of the kitchen, Anita telling us that an exoskeleton wouldn’t mend like human bones.

  The doctor had said my dad was about to have a blooming ulcer again. That’s the way Dr. Pollock expressed himself, according to my father. “Blooming ulcer,” like a British cop in a black-and-white movie, an old codger sipping tea, the blooming rainy weather, the blooming Jerries, dropping bombs all over London. But we knew what the doctor meant, how the secret sore might open up, like a flower. Ever since the evening at the coroner’s bureau, and the eventual news that the body was a young woman from Portland, Oregon, we had been needing to go somewhere far from home.

  When Dad found first gear, the new clutch like a miracle, we jackrabbited up the drive, over the boulders barely submerged under the pine needles, and I was the first one out of the car, into air that was still warm, a little summer returning before winter came for good.

  We had hoped, only half aware of it.

  We needed to be sure. The sheriff’s department had checked the cabin right after we reported Anita gone, and periodically over the last three months they had continued to drop by the place.

  Once we had come up to find signs of a break-in, the bottle of Wild Turkey Dad had kept under the sink empty and abandoned on the back porch, the denim shirts, hiking boots, and lumberjack shirts rifled, but nothing missing.

  I unlocked the cabin door with a key of my own, and let the door swing inward.

  The cabin was exactly as all four of us had left it, the cans of mushroom soup unopened, the extra long wooden fireplace matches, the yellowing want ads under a splintery chunk of wood, the amber red sap that had leaked out of the firewood last March grown white and stiff.

  My dad marched across the room and grabbed the phone there by the breakfast bar, taking a seat on the stool and calling up the answering machine. He didn’t bother telling us what the messages were, just listened, licking his lips, all of us breathing a little hard.

  “I can see why mountain climbers carry oxygen,” puffed my mother, the seven thousand feet of altitude hitting her especially. “I see spots,” she said. “In front of my eyes.” She waved her hand, parting gnats, except that there was nothing there.

  She fell onto the sofa with an apologetic laugh. Dad gave us his no-news expression, lips together, eyes focused on nothing. He hung up the phone. He said he would try to get the heater going, but I could tell that he needed to do something, anything, all of us struck by the hope we had never expressed, crazy, stupid, completely illogical. A hope that was suddenly gone.

  There was no sign of a visit from Anita anywhere, not even in the bathroom with the glass shelves of the medicine c
abinet that were always cold, even in the middle of summer, retaining a trace of the winter freeze. Things were like that in the mountains. Opening a closet, rummaging for slippers, when I found one it was like iron, cold footwear that had not been warm for months, another one of her shoes.

  Anita’s old traces were everywhere, including books she had long since outgrown, biographies of great female athletes, women of science. There was an empty forty-five pistol shell beside the blue scrub jay feather. I remembered when Anita found the copper shell, picking it up, carrying it back to the cabin, a thing that did not belong.

  “I didn’t realize she had so many clothes here,” said my father, the heater huffing on at last. “That’s why I had to turn right around and come out here. I look and see a line of hiking boots and running shoes, all of them hers.” Shoes she had outgrown, I nearly said. The counselor we had been seeing had encouraged us to share our feelings.

  Dad turned a knob on the heater and shut the door. He locked it, to keep the raccoons out. He found his way out over the roots of a sugar pine, taking deep breaths. He put his hand out to steady himself against a tree. “You told me it was a bad idea to come up here, that I ought to have the management company take care of the mouse holes and nail the shutters.”

  “I didn’t say it was a bad idea.” I had asked, “Are you sure?”

  “We’ll tool on up there and winterize the cabin,” was the way he had put it. If he didn’t get rest soon, he would need blood, type A, bleeding inside the way he had when he was younger and the market for wicker chairs collapsed. I couldn’t help reminding myself that the nearest hospital was in Tahoe City.

  When he stood silent for too long, I could sense the emptiness grow in him. He put his hand out to a sprig of pine, needing to touch something.

  “Did you think she might have come here?” my dad asked.

  “Maybe I did. In the back of my mind,” I said.

  “Maybe she did show up,” he said. He never used to sound like this. “And she was very careful not to disturb anything.”

  “Dad, I think I’m going to go for a swim.” Just to distract him, give him something to think about.

  “It’s almost dark,” he said.

  “It’ll be invigorating.”

  A swim in that water could kill a person, too far from shore. The water in Lake Tahoe was always just a few degrees above turning into ice, year-round. The lake never actually froze. It stayed just the way it was. But it was a tradition in our family, a quick dive in the water, an hour by the fire. It was late in the year for it, snow like dirty napkins out by the gravel drive, but the air was still warm, scented with sugar pine.

  My mother was still breathing hard, leaning back on the sofa. She saw me whisk my bathing trunks out of the duffel bag and she said, “Cray, you’re a maniac.” But it was after a moment’s hesitation, after she was going to say something else. This happened a lot, these days. Even when the fax came, saying that she could name her new species of bay tree, she didn’t tell us. I had to find out about it going through her papers, throwing away the mail she said God had not given her the strength to read.

  My bare feet felt their way, down along the pine twigs and the ant holes I could still see in the near dark, as though the sun had begun to set and then rebounded, bouncing gently back for an extra few minutes of dusk.

  “It’s almost freezing,” my dad said, teasingly, like a little kid, someone who wanted to be liked. Sometimes I felt this about my father—what a nervous, eager little kid he must have been, dancing around when he got all his spelling words right.

  He probably couldn’t see me against the dark water, shuddering not so much with cold but because the sand down near the lake was granite meal, coarse, and pinecones skittered underfoot. I half stepped on one, getting a pine tooth stuck under the ball of my foot, stuck on with pine sap.

  The lake crept up to my ankles, and I stood still. The mountains rose up, all the way around the lake, like outlines that had not existed one minute before. Little prickles of light distracted my eye, the casinos on the Nevada side.

  My leg bones ached. I told myself I would get used to it, taking another step, up to my knees, shivering. “It’s not too bad,” I called out, wondering if my dad was still watching, wanting him to be, hoping he would come down to the edge of the lake.

  I shook my foot to get the pine tooth off my sole, but I could not feel it. I couldn’t feel anything.

  “So what do you think?” said my dad from somewhere behind me, close. “Do you think I ought to go in and get my suit on, and come down for a swim?”

  I thought he might be joking, but then he said, “I have those old bathing trunks with the starfish printed on them, remember?” I could tell he was not joking, and yet he wasn’t serious either. He was just talking, needing to hear whatever I would say.

  “No, I don’t think you better,” I said.

  I could hear him thinking about my words, taking another step, looking out at me, or past me, at the water. I could feel him wanting to dive in, and swim as far and as hard as he could. I could feel him needing to hear my voice.

  “I think you’re right,” I said. “It’s too cold.”

  I knew he was looking at me, trying to see me in the dark.

  About the Author

  Michael Cadnum is the author of 35 books for adults and young adults. His work—which includes thrillers, suspense novels, historical fiction, and books about myths and legends—has been nominated for the National Book Award (The Book of the Lion), the Edgar Award (Calling Home and Breaking the Fall), and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (In a Dark Wood). A former National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, he is also the author of award-winning poetry. Seize the Storm (2012) is his most recent novel.

  Michael Cadnum lives in Albany, California, with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1996 by Michael Cadnum

  Cover design by Drew Padrutt

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-1979-8

  This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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