10

That proved it—he was quiet, to look at, but close to his own personal brand of hysteria. He had been down practically looking at all the people who had died since ten o’clock. My father was in a quiet panic, and Anita was going to clump through the door any second.

“You both go back to bed,” Dad said.

“You went all the way down to the police station and asked about dead bodies?” I asked, double-checking, hoping that maybe he would laugh a little and admit that was going too far. My mind works like this sometimes, circling back like a sniffing dog.

“Sure.”

The police headquarters in Oakland is miles away, almost to the Bay, a boxy, businesslike building. It was near a freeway, a double-decker highway that had partly collapsed in an earthquake. It was my father’s favorite sort of neighborhood, warehouses and the kind of restaurant that specializes in quick lunches. I could imagine the police being very nice to him, not telling him that he was just another overwrought parent. In a small way I was thankful that Dad had gone so far down his own mental checklist.

“What did they say?” I asked. I didn’t like the way my voice sounded, years younger. It was also a painful question. What I really meant was, What could they do? And how many people had died that night? If we were all going to go crazy, let’s do it together, I thought. I found it reassuring, too. Anita was alive and well.

She was only a few hours late. I tried to deny it, but it was out of character for Anita to be away nearly all night. She would spring into the house, with some bright explanation.

Accidents and doctors didn’t bother Anita, although she once said that everyone should be allowed to take a pain pill before they had a shot. She said her rare visits to Dr. Ames, the dentist, were calming, sitting there looking at the ceiling. One of the few times I had seen Anita really startled was when she nearly stepped on a gopher snake in the backyard, the brown-dappled creature whipping across the dirt and into the weeds.

Dad put his hand on my shoulder and gave it a squeeze. A good squeeze, like he was feeling the muscle, the bone. “I’m going to make some oatmeal,” he said.

My mother didn’t move. She wore the bathrobe Anita had given her the Christmas before. We all called it the spinach-omelette robe, yellow-and-black plaid flannel. Mom had a silver-colored clip in her dark hair. Anita got her blond looks from Dad. I knew it had not been Mom’s idea to get out all the old photos.

We all jumped a little when a grinding noise erupted from a corner of the sink. Mom had poured the ingredients into the machine before she went to bed, and now the bread maker was following the commands of its internal computer. I found myself wondering if it was making whole wheat or rye. Anita preferred whole wheat.

I hadn’t wanted to tell my parents about the flat tire the year before, not in every detail. Merriman thought the tire had been slashed. Someone had stuck a blade into the sidewall, but not all the way through—just enough so that twenty miles up the freeway, the Michelin blew.

Merriman has dark skin, the color of strong coffee. He told me some people didn’t like someone like him driving a brand-new Mercedes. I didn’t see things that way—once a graffiti artist had covered Ziff Furniture with four-letter words. It isn’t always racism or bigotry. Sometimes it’s just mean fun.

It was as though I wanted to protect my parents from some ugliness in the world. Maybe I was embarrassed for people, knowing that my parents were warmhearted and would not understand cruelty. I felt the same way about an especially bloody fight at school. I just didn’t like to talk about it at home.

“You know what they kept asking?” Dad said.

I was supposed to bounce the conversational ball back, and I did. “What did they keep asking?”

“They kept asking if we had a fight of some kind.”

I thought it was a pretty good question. But Anita and my dad had never had fights the way the Blankenships did, howled curses and the tinkling, crashing of God-knows-what getting smashed. Our family arguments had been only a little more heated than talk shows on Channel 9, pointed disagreements about whether chickens should be kept in cages or be allowed to range free.

“They keep suggesting maybe she’s off with a friend,” Dad was saying. “They say maybe she had some reason to be alone.”

“Things like that happen.” Where did I get this tone in my voice, this sound of reason and calm?

“Kyle knew,” Mom said, looking straight at the wall.

Dad had a bottle of Windex out, and a roll of paper towels.

“Why else,” she said, “would he call and ask to speak to her?”

Maybe she was with Kyle right now, I thought. Dad squirted Windex on the stove top. “I called Kyle,” Dad said.

“You called Kyle’s house?” I heard myself say.

Dad gave a quick nod, a silent sure.

That was even more dramatic than checking the list of unclaimed bodies with the police. I had to marvel at my father. When he went to battle stations, he went all the way. “You talked to Kyle’s dad?”

Dad was wiping the top of the stove with the Windex, making it shine. “For a second or two.”

Kyle’s dad was the most unfriendly person I had ever met. He had made his money selling house trailers. I had never heard him speak a complete sentence. Kyle was tactless and curt, but his dad was like someone who would blow your head off. Plus, he had just had a pig valve put into his heart.

Mom tilted her head, meaning that she was listening but not about to talk. Dad was addressing her when he added, “Kyle says he doesn’t know anything.”

“I don’t believe it,” I said, and Mom gave a slow nod, her eyes closed.

I said, “Kyle knows.”

“He was very sleepy,” Dad said, as though that proved something.

“Kyle knows Anita wasn’t telling us everything,” I said. “All this time, shaving a few hours off work to—” To do what young women did with men. I was the one who would shout at Anita when she came home. “He knows who she’s been going out with.”

“Calm down,” said my dad.

“I’m going to go get Kyle and drag him over here,” I said. “I want him to sit right here in this kitchen and look me in the eye and tell me he doesn’t know where Anita is.”

“Relax, Cray,” said my dad from somewhere behind me.

But I was rushing through the living room, hooking the keys to the Jeep off the plate on the side table with one hand, feeling my eagerness to have somewhere to go, something to do.

I could picture Kyle telling me he didn’t know anything about Anita, his eyes looking everywhere but right into mine.

The sky was light blue to the east. A bird fluttered in the bottlebrush plant, chirping.

All night, I thought.

She’s been up all night, gone, away. And she never called.