12

Dad was standing in the front doorway, full daylight through the open door, morning clouds burned away.

“You better go talk to Mom,” I said.

He turned, looked me a question, and I handed him Anita’s blue address book.

He opened it very carefully. It was a new book, the most recent in Anita’s long history of phone numbers. The pages turned stiffly. Anita had very correct printing, made for keeping records, filling out forms. She knew a lot of people.

Even upside down I could make out familiar names, Kyle Anderson right at the beginning of the book. One summer, when I was nine, Anita had pretended she was a librarian. She made library cards for each of us, and kept records, checking out old Scientific Americans to Dad.

“Look through here and see if—” He couldn’t complete the thought. He wanted me to see if there was a name I didn’t recognize, or a name I did, someone dangerous, mysteriously attractive.

“We shouldn’t be looking at her stuff,” I said.

“Who is this?” said Dad, showing me a name, Dr. Coors, with an address on Piedmont Avenue. I turned the pages of the address book, hearing Anita’s exasperated whisper in my mind. When she was annoyed she dropped her voice to a hiss. She didn’t like to shout. She would understand when she saw how tired we looked. We didn’t know what else to do.

“Who is Dr. Coors?” asked Dad, demanding. He wanted Dr. Coors to be the name we were looking for, a shadowy doctor, specializing in street drugs.

Dr. Coors had very blond, nearly white, curly hair up and down his arms. “He gave Bronto his shots,” I said.

Dad took the stairs three at a time, hurrying to talk to Mom. I followed more slowly and stopped at Anita’s room.

Mother had been everywhere, tugging drawers, opening files. Boxes were open, old videos and comic books, remains of Anita’s childhood, scattered across the floor. Mom was good at this sort of thing. Even the mess was more organized than it looked, her old jump ropes in a pile with her obsolete, worn-out Ping-Pong paddles and brightly colored tennis balls.

A diary was open beside a stack of old report cards. Mother had no right to look at this, and there it was, spread open in the morning sun.

I sat on the bed. Anita’s graduation picture was on a far shelf. It didn’t really look like her. There was a school district rule for those photos—everyone had to wear the same sweater, a similar pearl necklace. I was going to have my own graduation portrait snapped in a few weeks, a jacket and tie, “preferably a dark tie and a gray-to-dark jacket, navy blue allowable.”

I don’t know who sets this kind of policy. But the result is that graduates, photographed almost a full year before, look a little bit like strangers, people smiling while they hold their breath. Here was this richly colored portrait of Anita, her chin down, her eyes steady, the mandatory smile. She had worn jeans to the photographer’s, and paint-spattered tennis shoes without laces, well-dressed only from the waist up.

When the pictures came in the mail, in those stiff cardboard, do-not-bend envelopes, she had threatened to burn them. As a joke. I think she liked the one we all picked out. And I wondered if this is how Anita might look to a stranger, a lecher in a passing car, someone who didn’t even know her name.

Every time I looked at the clock, I could not believe how slowly time passed.

When the phone rang, someone snatched it eagerly, but it was always only Anita’s boss or Jesse, reassuring Dad but having to call him four times between six-thirty and eight forty-five to get straight on what had to be done with the hopper, when the fire inspector was coming.

“Until she comes home,” my dad said, concluding each phone call. He’s almost the only person I know who doesn’t say good-bye when he hangs up. He ends phone calls like someone in a movie, just dropping the receiver.

“Kyle is coming by,” said Dad after another phone call.

“Kyle is coming to tell us what he knows,” I said. “He changed his mind. Decided to be helpful.” I had changed my mind about wanting to see Kyle. I didn’t want to see him, and I did not want Kyle here. My family was wounded, tired, and I didn’t want to see Kyle’s hard little eyes.

Kyle was probably stopping by to amuse himself. His own life was too boring. I knew we had always seemed colorful to him, everyone always in a rush. Nobody hurried in Kyle’s family.

“He just said he wanted to share the worry,” said Dad. “He’ll be by as soon as he drives his dad back from an appointment with his doctor.”

“I don’t want to see him,” I said.

Dad didn’t seem to hear me. He paged through the address book. He had called several people, interrupting breakfasts, finding that people had already left for work. It was harder than calling hospitals.

Usually the person he called knew who my dad was, but he didn’t know them, so there was a friendly, cheerful aspect to the call, talk about the weather, the lack of rain. What made it worse, my dad said more than once, laughing too energetically into the phone, was that all this worry might be totally unnecessary. She might be home any second.

I had a bad thought, revolving around the words you hear in the news, “beyond recognition.” Maybe she had been in a fire, and her body had burned so badly it didn’t look like her.

So I tried to have some other mental pictures—Anita on a ferry on the Bay, empty champagne glass in her hand. Anita sleeping off a wild party, innocently, curled up on a sofa, no head for alcohol. Anita waking and this very moment fumbling in her purse, finding coins, making the phone call.

Breathless, full of apologies.

We had all forgotten it. Only I remembered, and set the baked bread on the sink. It was honey brown, and still a little warm when I cupped my hands around it and really felt what was there.

When there was a knock at the front door, I knew it was Anita, too embarrassed to pop right in, too guilty to run all the way upstairs to pee or take off some clothes that she couldn’t stand anymore, too tight, too hot.

It was a woman I didn’t recognize, and a car parked at the curb, one of those light green, almost colorless sedans. She gave me a card like a salesperson, a business card imprinted with the familiar oak-tree silhouette. But she didn’t work for the school district. I gave the card a good look but still had trouble reading the words. I didn’t have to; I knew what she was.

I thought that maybe this is how the news might come. If something terrible happened. If they found her, and the news was not good. The woman in a dark blue skirt and matching jacket asked to speak with Mr. or Mrs. Buchanan.

I let her in.