9

An engine started up outside, a beefy rumble.

It was still dark out. I got up in time to see Dad’s white Jeep veer out of the driveway. Gears clanked. The two headlights illuminated the sprawling junipers in the front yard while Dad pumped the clutch, trying to shift. Our front yard was in good shape. A man from Green Planet Garden Service dropped by to touch it up once a week. Round stepping-stones led out into the middle of the lawn.

We have three cars, a twelve-cylinder Jaguar, a vintage MG, and the noisy Jeep. Each car is fun, and each has something wrong with it. We have money—a cabin at Tahoe, raw land on the north coast. But my dad’s life is crammed with projects.

As Dad found first gear and accelerated, I caught a glimpse of his profile, portable telephone held to his ear. I could picture my dad following his plan, step by step. First, visit the place where Anita worked. There would be a night crew, security guards. Maybe Anita was still there, so involved in her work she couldn’t turn her head to look at the clock.

Then he would cruise the BART station. After that he would follow the route home, checking out the bus stop, driving the short distance from the bus stop here, stopping every now and then to peer.

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.