13

A man in a suit stepped in behind her, smelling of coffee and aftershave.

Her card gave her name as Detective DeAnne Waterman, from the Juvenile Division of the Oakland Police. Detective Waterman had long hair pulled back into a soft bun at the back of her head. There were two white streaks in her hair, the sort of lightning strikes some women have added in the beauty parlor.

The detective did not make any remark to me beyond asking to speak to my parents. I invited her to sit down, and she did, but on one of the blue wicker chairs people rarely used. She had a briefcase under her arm, a black bag with a shoulder strap. Her eyes were kind, dark, and I tried to read her mind by looking into them. She wasn’t talking, but she was thinking, giving me a reassuring smile.

She waited to speak to my parents, and the man who was with her sat in my dad’s favorite easy chair, leaning forward. He was quiet the way a Seeing Eye dog is, an important shadow. He had tiny pockmarks all over his cheeks. Both visitors were on edge, like they were going to start a footrace right there in the living room.

“Nice plants,” said the man with the pinholes all over his face.

“I really admire someone with a green thumb,” said Detective Waterman, both cops ready to play a game of Small Talk. She asked me my name and I told her. “The plants belong to my mother,” I said as I went to get Dad.

My dad had heard them come in. He hurried to finish a phone call, and as soon as he hung up, he looked at my feet, afraid to catch my expression. “What did they say?”

I wanted to tell them all that it was too early to have the police sitting around in the dining room. I wanted to tell them everything he had done up to now was way too fast.

We all needed to slow down. I had the feeling we could punch a rewind button or pull the plug on the machine that made all the clocks run forward. Anita would be here, with something she had found, an old license plate she thought Dad would like, or a lizard skin, like the one she found last summer, like a plastic cutout with four legs.

I wanted to say all this, but all I said was, “They just want you and Mom.” I couldn’t bring myself to make another sound. This might be it, I knew. This might be the news my mother and dad had been afraid of since Anita was born. It was the news I was afraid of whenever my dad was late coming home, whenever my mom’s plane was delayed.

I also wanted to add that they were both calm, nice. Nice is an important word. I like quiet, soft-voiced people. I did not feel they were here with bad news, but I could not be sure. Maybe they had especially pleasant cops deliver very bad news.

Dad left me, hurrying into the living room. One of the strands of my mother’s coffee plant draped over Detective Waterman’s shoulder.

“There’s no news about your daughter,” said Detective Waterman, a tiny drop of water from the leaves soaking into her jacket.

My mother appeared at the top of the stairs. “There’s no news,” my father repeated, to my mother, to all of us. It was almost wonderful—no bad news. And then the tiredness came back all over again.

My mother had put on a dress she never wore, something with a sash, a sea green cloth that looked all wrong this time of day. No one can change her appearance as dramatically as my mother. Most of the time she looks like a frumpy ranch hand, someone who could shoot a buffalo in her spinach-omelette bathrobe. Now she looked like a weary hostess. She extended her hand and thanked them for coming over, like they were new neighbors.

“Missing Persons and Juvenile work hand in hand,” said Detective Waterman. “On weekends we work out of the same office.” She said this just as she took my mother’s hand, as if the two of them were acting out a skit, “The Inner Workings of the Oakland Police.”

It was not a weekend, I wanted to say. It was Friday.

They all followed my father into his den. There was a table over to one side, covered with photos of Anita.

My dad’s den is a room of shelves and books, a television only he watches, a small Sony perched on a pile of old magazines. The wall is decorated with maps of faraway islands, atolls, and reefs.

I didn’t like the man with the pinprick holes in his face. He looked at me from over by the maple accent table, an item Ziff used to make until earlier that year. The cop looked at me again after a few moments, keeping his finger on a picture of Anita on her seventeenth birthday. She was wearing a sweatshirt and cutoff Levi’s. I had been in charge of the camera that day. The picture was a little blurred, the camera strap a fuzzy gray caterpillar at one corner of the photo.

I couldn’t stop myself from having this thought: I could match myself against this man physically and win. He was muscled under his poly-blend suit jacket and probably knew some police academy choke holds. But if I put a shoulder into him, he would go down.

Right in the middle of this thought, the cop gave me a smile. The little holes in his face closed up when he showed his teeth, his eyes warm, and I felt how mistaken I was. I felt how jagged I was inside, shaky, nothing fitting together. Detective Waterman glanced my way and she smiled, too. She was pretty in a no-nonsense way. It bothered me, how badly my mood matched what was really happening, two police here to help my family.

“I took a lot of those pictures,” I said.

I was ashamed at the quality of the photos. I can take a good picture, with a little luck. My camera work was betraying Anita, making her look like someone she wasn’t. I imagined Detective Waterman going around to motels with one of my snapshots. Did you see anyone who looked like this? she would ask. And the motel clerk would say no, even though Anita was sleeping in room 9 that very minute.

“What do you think?” asked Detective Waterman, looking right at me. I tried to imagine her with her hair wet down to her shoulders, telling her hairdresser, “I want lightning bolts, one on either side of my head.” “Can you think of a reason Anita didn’t come home last night?”

I shook my head, the way someone does at supper when his mouth is full and he can’t answer right away. But it was feeling that kept me from talking for a moment. Detective Waterman clicked her pen, a gold ballpoint

“I think she’s all right,” I said. My voice was ragged. “I think she’s with someone.”

“Do you think,” asked Detective Waterman, “maybe she decided to leave—and not come back?”

“She needed a life of her own,” said my mother, like someone reading the title of a story in a magazine. The pain in her voice hurt me.

Some routine places should be checked, my dad said. The land up in Mendocino, the cabin at Tahoe. A local park ranger or sheriff could pay a visit to those places, my dad was saying, trying to calm us down by sounding in control. Detective Waterman made a note and said, “I’ll follow up on that.”

“She left a new pair of pants,” I said. “Folded on the chair.”

I had their attention. They needed me to complete my thought. I said, “She’ll be here any minute.”

It was natural for Kyle to make his entrance then. He knocked, but the front door had been left open, and his knock was a faraway noise that didn’t catch anyone’s attention.

His voice reached us from somewhere in the living room, all the way inside the house. “Hello?”

My dad looked up sharply and my mother didn’t seem to hear a sound. Dad made a motion with his head, meaning, Go see what he wants.

I closed the door to the den firmly behind me. As I left I heard Detective Waterman ask how much Anita weighed.

I greeted Kyle and told him there wasn’t any news. I asked if he would like to sit down, and he sat.

“It’s ten-thirty,” he said.

I wanted to argue that it wasn’t that late in the morning, but the antique clock in the corner agreed with Kyle.

I hadn’t eaten anything since last night’s lasagna. “Would you like some toast?” I asked.

“No,” said Kyle.

“How about some orange juice?” I suggested.

“No.”

“I can warm up a Pop-Tart,” I said.

“I ate,” said Kyle.

Sometimes I would play a private game, offer him cold drinks, hot drinks, snacks, waiting for him to say “No, thank you.” He would just get a certain stiffness to his head and shoulders, resenting each offer a little more. If I happened to mention something he would like, he never said “please.” It was always, “I’ll have some of that.”

“I’m going to make myself some toast,” I said.

“Something must have happened to her,” said Kyle.