16

The Blankenships had been the first house on our street to order crushed white gravel. A small mountain of it had occupied their driveway for a couple of weeks. It wasn’t simply white—it sparkled. The crushed quartz was spread by Mr. Blankenship himself, forming a bright white path that circled his lawn. Other neighbors decided that white gravel was a brilliant idea, and in the following months more dump trucks of glittering rock rolled up our street.

Now the Blankenships’ gravel was scattering, bare places in the path. A strange type of weed grew in the midst of the gravel, a flat, spreading plant, looking like great green cow pies against the dazzling white. And the gravel found its way far from where it was supposed to be. I kicked a piece of gravel ahead of me, one great kick sending it all the way down the street. The closer I came to my house, the harder my pulse beat.

As soon as I saw my own house, I knew. I went sick-cold.

A blue van was angled up the driveway, right behind the Jeep. The van had KTVU all over it, big white letters, on the sides, on the back. Dad knows a few television people, serving on committees with TV-and radio-station owners. I could imagine him on the telephone, convincing one of his friends that this was a hot story.

But now I couldn’t argue with the feeling I had. Dad was right. I stood in the living room, near the coffee plant, trying to hear what was going on in my dad’s den. Whatever was happening, it was almost over. A pretty Asian woman with a startling amount of makeup came out of the den smiling, reaching for a briefcase a man was carrying.

I had seen this woman on television, and was surprised how young she looked, young and brightly colored, her face full of pinks of various shades, her eyes carefully outlined. She was wearing a dark blue jacket, and I remember thinking how amazingly pretty she looked, only a few years older than myself. Not sexy and not beautiful—someone you wanted to look at and never stop.

She had an assistant, a man who could have been the fire marshal’s brother, one of those hard-looking men with steady eyes. The cameraman had baggy pants with about nine extra pockets and a blue T-shirt with MICHIGAN across the chest, yellow lettering. The T-shirt had shrunk with use, and his arms stuck down from the shortened sleeves. He swung the tiny video cam from a strap.

I tried to judge from what was being said—and not said—what had happened.

Dad saw me but did not give me any sign except for an open-eyed expression I knew was supposed to communicate something. He walked his visitors down the front steps. He was talking about property tax. He said a special assessment had paid for the sidewalks in this part of Oakland. I did not mistake this patter for anything but filler talk, the chatter Dad keeps up because he can’t keep quiet. He worked the talk around to streetlights, and then to crime, what he had been talking about all along even when he changed the subject a little, working around to the only thing that was really on his mind.

Mom came to my room. I had fled there. That was the only word for it. I saw these television people, their easy, relaxed faces, walking off with a news story about my sister, and I could not stand to talk to anyone.

I didn’t mean to hide from the world. Sometimes, just like my mother, I need a few minutes to myself.

She sat next to me on the bed. She put her two hands together, her right hand over her left, so the wedding ring showed through her fingers as she massaged her knuckles, her fingers, taking some time out from talking. Dad’s voice reached us from downstairs, his words muffled but his tone carrying through the floor from wherever he was in the house, portable phone to his ear.

“I can’t look at it,” Mom said at last. She was wearing a lab smock, a white coat. The pockets made a crumpling sound, a noise I recognized, typical of my mother under stress.

She put a small book into my hands, Anita’s diary. It fell open to the same page I had seen the day before. The handwriting in her diary was so hurried, or so cramped with feeling, that I could almost convince myself it was not hers. But it was. The bottom half of one page was a single word, “Blisters,” written in tall, scraggly letters. And beneath it, five exclamation points. She had bought a new pair of shoes for hiking and the right shoe had tortured her. A few nights ago she had sat watching television, putting Band-Aids on bright pink sores on her foot, the room smelling of disinfectant.

“Please,” she said. “Please read it and tell me.”

“The handwriting is a little messy,” I said.

She gave a quick little nod. That was what we would both pretend—that Mom had trouble figuring out Anita’s penmanship.

“There wasn’t any news,” I said, not asking, making it sound like an announcement.

“No,” she said. “No news.”

I really hated the posters on the walls, supernovas and interstellar gas, the kind that glows purple by the time the sight of it reaches Earth. I had no interest in any of it. In another year I would be out of high school, and I had no plans. It struck me as I sat there with my mother weeping. She was trying not to, making the bed tremble. I would have to decide what college I would go to. And what I would major in—I would have to think about that, too. Not right away—not today, not this week.

But I was letting weeks slip by without thinking that I had a future. I sat beside my mother and read Anita’s diary, from the first, neatly printed entries from almost a year ago to the bounding, energetic writing of the night I had seen her tending one of her blisters.

Anita indicated a break in time with a row of dots, small circles, six of them. Never five or seven. Six tidy circles that meant she had not written anything for a while. Sometimes a week had gone by, sometimes three. The time skipped was indicated by the same set of symbols, six dots.

I still thought that Anita might bound up the stairs, but I no longer felt I had to have an explanation ready. I could take as long as I wanted, turning the pages beside my mother, who fell still and silent. I trusted her quiet more than my father’s chatter.

If an archaeologist discovered this journal centuries from now, brushed away the dust, and translated the scribbles, he would conclude that it was written by a young woman with no other human beings in her life. There was no mention of any of us. Kyle’s name appeared once—“Kyle thinks so, too.”

It was a book of lists, mostly. Books she had read, books she wanted to read, movies she liked, movies she hated. Then the lists grew complicated, branching into arguments, why one author should not have killed herself, why she dreamed she was trapped in a movie about a recluse who found a human tooth in a hole in the wall of his dining room.

The summer before, Anita had begun reading biographies. She read about women who wrote books and poems, women who painted, sang the blues, ruled empires. She began to read diaries, the journals of famous people, writers who would start an entry, “The sun came out by afternoon after spits and spots of rain,” and end by writing that there was no God.

I could see Anita trying to sound like one of these people, how the sunlight slanted through the cedars in the Blankenships’ front yard. I could see her trying to be someone she was not. Not sounding false so much as empty, keeping herself out of the pages and letting someone else in, someone who had never heard of Mom’s fossil collection or the way I could throw a football forty yards off a scissor kick.

“Is there anything?” my mother asked when I closed the book.

For a moment I could not speak, almost blaming Anita for whatever had happened.