Zero at the Bone (13 page)

A prostitute pivoted on the corner, tight skirt, red blouse. Sometimes they work MacArthur, near the motels, and then the police cars cruise once too often and they drift up a few blocks. They move around a lot, walking tight little circles, standing still, then swinging into action again. Men think with their eyes—that seems to be the theory.

The downstairs of our house was taken over with flyers in boxes, the national movement for finding lost people having just found itself a new member, my dad trying to read and digest every single statistic. Every now and then, he read a phrase aloud. “The exploitation of children increases every year,” he would read, pacing as he turned pages. Mother had sat there watching him, not taking her eyes off him for a second.

“The anonymous urban wasteland,” he read. “Christ.” I couldn't tell whether he approved of what he was reading or was just caught up in a frenzy of information, the way he gets when a new glue is discovered that will seal the plastic on the dressers twice as fast and at half the cost.

“Stop and take a look,” Paula said as we passed the woman in the red blouse.

I was taking it slow, up Telegraph Avenue. At first it was all storefronts, the kind of store that barely stays in business, kitchen tile shops, locksmiths, a big plywood cutout of a key, hand-lettered
CLOSED
.

“She won't charge you anything if you just park and say hi,” said Paula.

I couldn't tell Paula that prostitutes embarrass me. Just seeing one makes me feel like looking in the other direction. Partly because the theory is right—I do think with my eyes, and sometimes I wish I didn't.

As we reached the Oakland-Berkeley border, there were groceries, restaurants. We passed the empty windows of T-rama, the shop where Anita had her dead-animal T-shirt made.

“This is where I saw the naked man,” said Paula.

“In the crosswalk?” I asked.

“He was walking along with no pants on and no shirt on. But he had his shoes,” said Paula.

I had heard the story before. “This guy was completely naked,” I said, just to keep her talking. I appreciated her company, and Paula was happy as long as she was telling a story, or trying out some of her words. She was wearing a baggy sweater that must have once belonged to one of her brothers and a pair of cutoff jeans. I found myself realizing that her hair was much longer than it used to be, all the way to her shoulders.

“But not having fun. I could tell by looking at him,” she said.

“He was disoriented,” I said. The flavor was already gone from the chewing gum. I tossed the wad into the street.

“Can you imagine being so mental you would put on your shoes but nothing else? Just walk out of your house?”

“His feet hurt.” I didn't want to hear about a man losing his mind.

“This was a man maybe your dad's age. Could have been your dad's brother.” Paula and I went to the Oakland Zoo once, and Paula kept wandering back to the monkey house, hoping to see one or two of them taking advantage of their frisky nakedness.

“He walked out and noticed the splinters in the steps, or the sidewalk hurt.” I had to make this story sound less pathetic than it was. “Maybe he kept a pair of slip-ons by the front door. It was natural for him to put his feet in his old tennis shoes and shuffle on down to the mailbox.”

“You think Anita left work and went up Telegraph Avenue. Maybe took a bus into Berkeley. Or maybe she got a ride.”

I was not happy at the way Paula put it. “We can't search every street in North Oakland,” I said, admitting that, if she was getting impatient, I couldn't blame her.

“If she came up here and met a friend …” Paula said. She was giving me a break, letting me fill in the silence myself. “Maybe she doesn't want to be found.”

“Maybe not.”

“
Lussuria
,” she said. “Italian for lust. Cray—she's probably all right. You're just torturing yourself. Your whole family is going crazy. She's probably having the most wonderful time in her life.”

“She wanted something to happen,” I said, trying to agree with her. “She expected it. An exciting adventure.”

“With a man.”

Paula said she wanted a burrito supremo.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“You'll want something like that, too,” she said.

I looked up at the board, the menu written in yellow chalk, and I didn't want anything. The man behind the counter smiled with surprising warmth. He was just doing his job. I knew that feeling—how he would look at the clock from time to time, looking forward to closing the restaurant, mopping the empty, peaceful place. But he enjoyed certain moments, too, joking with his fellow workers, being friendly to the customers. I finally ordered a side of guacamole, just so Paula wouldn't have to eat the legendary Consuelo's Cafe killer burrito without company.

“My family would just be getting around to worrying,” she said. “My dad would just be starting to think that it had been two or three days since he'd seen my face around the house. Your family is so intense.”

“Tense,” I corrected her.

“Both,” she said.

I ate a corn chip. Paula had to wait for her order; it probably took three people half an hour to make a burrito that size. I pushed my guacamole to the middle of the table, sharing. I could never tell if Paula was intelligent or only flashy. Conversation had never been important between us, except when Paula did all the talking.

“She could walk though that door,” she said. “Right now, starving for a plate of chicken flautas.”

“She would have called,” I said, the cutting, quiet tone I use when I am warning someone to stop chattering.

The man at the counter called Paula's number. Her burrito supremo was huge, about the size of a loaf of bread. She prodded it with the fork, letting steam out through the small holes she made. It was wrapped in a flour tortilla, pale, wrinkled. The table was a battlefield of other diners' drinks, their salsa, their chicken tacos.

“A big mistake,” she said, putting down the tray.

“I know you can do it.”

“I'm going to need your help,” said Paula, looking down at her dish.

“It's the size of a small person,” I said.

“It scares me to look at it,” she said.

Music broke into the murmur of voices, brassy, trumpety Mexican music, syrupy stuff, the sort of music designed to make people order one more beer.

For a moment I forgot. I was happy.

22

Paula's house was full of light, every window ablaze. Shadows passed the living room curtains, a house full of brothers and uncles. Her family gathered to watch television, warning the good guy to watch his back, cheering, pizza crumbs flying from their mouths, when a bad guy got blasted to red soup.

I told her I didn't want to go in, and she looked at me a little sadly. There had not been much physical affection between us this night, although I had eaten the last of her burrito, just to help out. If I went out even once with Kentia, I know we would have to go somewhere with white tablecloths, fresh flowers, tiny portions of roasted quail.

“I wasn't sure whether to give you this,” Paula said. She tugged at her back pocket and paper crackled.

It was an envelope, and all the way home it kept the curve of Paula's body as it rocked beside me on the empty seat.

When I eased the Jeep up the driveway, no visiting vehicles were parked in front of the house. The front door was ajar and I had the feeling something was happening, a meeting, or Dad off on an errand.

He doesn't go out for a jog or a walk, or take a drive. He runs errands. But I walked through the door, alert to any clue, and there was Mother, hands on her hips looking big, wearing her lab coat and a pair of jeans. There was a space of time when no one spoke or moved.

“You knew better, Cray,” she said finally, her voice a rasp.

It took me only a split second, but for that brief time, I didn't understand. “It's ten minutes after ten o'clock,” I said. “I said I would have the Jeep back at ten-fifteen.”

My dad popped into the room. It was very much like him to appear so quickly. He looked at me for a moment as though he were going to draw a picture of me, a long look, his head tilted back.

“You knew better,” she said, barely above a whisper.

She did not bother moving quickly. She took her time, made her way to the stairs and took each step in turn. This was how she had moved many months before, when the weight finally peaked and the doctor told her she would risk stroke or diabetes if she didn't begin to lose. My father stood there and I watched her, all the way to the top of the stairs. She had not put all the weight back on in two days, but her face was puffy and her skin was flushed and there was a heat in the room, her body heat, the kind of heat I could feel when she had been eating, her metabolism running double-time.

She passed into the shadows of the hall. Her door rattled. After a brief silence the door slammed. A muffled crash came from her office. She did this when she was upset—grabbed a chair and threw it. And then she sat down wherever the chair happened to be, planted herself and didn't move.

I stood there, touching my hair, scratching my arm, feeling like a guilty person pretending to be innocent. Then I turned and shut the front door, hard. There was a good silence for a moment, solid, a presence in the house. We could go on like this for a long time. When Anita and I had a fight, this was how it was, taking positions in the house and ignoring each other, aware of every sound.

“You have to be extra careful,” said my dad.

He spoke deliberately, having trouble with the words:
Ya hafta be
. I have never seen my dad drunk, and I thought this was a first, something to put on a page of my own diary, if I kept one. But when I drew closer to him I saw how tired he was, too, tired all the way through, weak with it. And brilliant with it, too, a clutch of papers in his hands, photocopies of Anita's vital stats—date of birth, weight, blood type.

“You drive in back of the place she worked.” He was too burned out to make the words sound like a question. It sounded like a wooden command, a zombie giving an order.

“Oakland Scavenger already picked up,” I said.

These words did not seem to make sense to him. The trash in Oakland is collected by a company proud of this ugly name. The word
scavenger
sounds terrible to me; I picture vultures fighting over scarlet bones.

He gave a little nod at last. “I don't know why I even suggested it,” he said.

I must have smiled wearily, or made some sign. It had been a difficult thing to do. My dad said, “Thank you.”

I did not respond at once, surprised. “I also drove up Telegraph.”

“But she wouldn't be—” He couldn't say: She wouldn't be lying dead on the curb. I began to feel it was wrong for him to press that flashlight into my hands and suggest I look for Anita behind the shelving plant. What if I had found her? What a cruel thing to make a brother do, discover the corpse of his own sister.

“I bet that's how police find people sometimes,” I said. I couldn't stay angry with him. I was even trying to make his attitude sound reasonable. “By looking.”

“You go on up and talk to her,” he said.

“Dad, you have to rest.”

“Have you thought about what you're going to do?” he said. He was wearing his V-neck undershirt, the V torn a little, a ragged Y, and a very nice pair of pants, one of his suit pants, navy blue with faint pinstripes.

I didn't have any idea what he was talking about.

“Now,” he said.

“Tonight?”

“From now on,” he said.

Because you're all we have, he meant to say. The college you go to, the job you take up, your future—it was all my parents had left. For the first time in a long while, I found myself thinking about football. Thinking about touchdowns and perfectly thrown passes gave me no pleasure.

I wanted to tell him she was going to come back. I heard myself say, instead, “They're going to find her.”

In one of the museums in San Francisco, there was a room no one could go into. All a visitor could do was stand in the doorway and look.

I loved this room. I saw it on field trips in third grade and again in seventh, and on visits with my family, while everyone else marveled at the aquarium or the skeleton of the allosaurus.

It was an eighteenth-century room, with a desk and a quill pen, and delicate chairs, and wooden panels on the wall. The window's shutters were open, and there was a view of something, a blank wall, I think. It was supposed to remind us of the place that wasn't there anymore, an eighteenth-century town.

Anita's room was like this. We should put a rope across it, one of those chains wrapped in velvet. Only the museum curator would ever enter to repair, to restore, to keep it the way it had been. I had to reach into the dark to find the light switch, and then I could stand at the line where the carpet changed, from worn hall carpet to new gray, Anita's choice when we visited the Carpet Coliseum.

It would take some work. Mother had left the room looking cluttered, books tumbled off shelves, drawers half-pushed-in. Unless that was what we decided to preserve—the way her room looked after the first, quick search.

Of course, I reminded myself, Anita herself would be here soon, to put her hands to her head and shriek theatrically, “What a mess!” But she would not really mind. She would understand and forgive. Anita would have a story to tell.

I closed the door to Anita's room and walked up the hall, to my mother's office. I knocked at her door. There was no sound. I turned the knob, and to my surprise it was not locked.

My mother was sitting at her desk. She was looking at the blank computer screen. The crookneck lamp was on, light gleaming off paper clips and pencils. A drawing had fallen out of a file, a leaf, drawn to scale, three centimeters of a leaf like the kind people put into their spaghetti sauce, except this leaf was millions of years old.