8

When I woke I sat up at once, thinking: What was that?

Bronto was gone, and there was a light on in the house somewhere. Someone had forgotten to turn it off, I told myself. I could forget about it and go back to sleep.

But the light was bright, a lance of it falling through the bedroom door. The door had opened somehow, and the light was getting brighter the longer I lay there. I would have to climb out of bed, go downstairs, and turn off the lamp. It was one of those simple problems that loom when you are still half-asleep and don’t want to get up.

And then I heard my dad’s voice. I knew he was on the phone by his tone, and the rhythm of his speech. He would talk, and then there would be a silence. Then his voice again, even more tense, and another silence. He was arguing with someone, keeping his temper. I could not hear the words.

It was one-fifteen. I tried to tell myself that this was one of those Dad problems, an issue that had nothing to do with me. Sometimes he stayed up late, calling Poland, where the bentwood chairs were made and shipped in pieces, spools and chair legs, to be assembled here. I heard my mother’s voice, questioning.

I never have figured out what to wear to bed. I hate pajamas, largely because I always outgrow them so fast, and when they are tight not only do you look gawky, with your arms too long, but when you wake up with an early-morning erection it sticks out obviously and embarrassingly. Even when no one is looking, I don’t like to feel awkward about what I’m wearing.

These days I tended to wear a large gray sweatshirt to bed, but I still had to pull on a pair of pants to make myself fit for company. Dragging on the pants made this all the more significant—there was something going on.

I padded down the stairs in my bare feet. The wooden steps were cold. The lights were on the living room, every single lamp, but there was no one there, only rumpled places in the chair and the sofa, impressions of their weight.

My dad had just put the telephone down, and he was looking at me without seeing me.

“What’s happening?” I said.

“Dad was calling BART police,” said Mom.

I didn’t like the way that sounded, and a very bad feeling flickered in my stomach. Then it was gone, and with a certain tenseness in my body I felt myself grow just a little stupid as a form of protection.

Bay Area Rapid Transit is a subway system. BART has its own police department. It is its own world—you buy a ticket and you enter transit land, scenery blurring by.

“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.