19

I found my mother in her office. Bronto was sitting in a chair next to her, and for a moment it looked as though the cat was giving her advice. Mom had opened several Jiffy bags, and the padding from the bags scattered over her desktop, gray dust. A stack of new books rested on her desk, new geology textbooks and magazines as thick as books with lists of articles on the cover.

I’m a different person early in the morning. Smells are brighter, sounds are cleaner. I can’t get a grip on things, though, fumbling, slow but hypersensitive. I hate to go running early in the day because it’s twice as much work, dragging my body before it wants to go.

Mom had a cup of coffee, a crust of what had been a turkey sandwich. It was like a morning weeks before this one, before any of this had happened. She carefully whisked the bread crumbs into her trash can with the side of her hand.

I showed her Anita’s diary, opened it before her on the desk. She did not look at it for more than a moment, gave it one stony glance and looked away. She asked what I had found. Bronto stretched his neck and chewed on a corner of the diary, experimentally. I gave the cat a gentle push and he landed on the floor, looking serene.

She was hoping she would not have to read it herself, but I didn’t say anything. She turned and looked at the page open before her. She lifted her shoulders and let them fall.

Then she read the two words, leaning on her elbows, taking as long as she would have taken with a beefy paragraph.

I showed her other passages I had overlooked at first. The word “tonight,” circled, at the top of one page. “I promised” at the bottom of another page. Her real life, her actual feelings, exploded on the page only in tight little bursts. It was easy not to see them at all on first reading.

“So?”

I hate that. A person can give a whole presentation, logical and eloquent, and a bored listener can wipe out the entire argument by saying, “So?”

Besides, I could see the dishonesty in my mother’s posture. She was pretending she didn’t get my point, but she did. “There was something going on in her life.”

My mother closed her eyes. Maybe she was going to cry again. Maybe she was going to shriek. I was nervous for a moment, not able to judge her mood. “You have to know Anita,” I said, very gently.

“She was always thinking,” said my mother at last.

I was a little relieved. She was in control of her feelings. That was easier for both of us. “She had a friend none of us knew about,” I said.

“I wonder if I really understood her,” she said. She gave a silent, sad laugh, shaking her head, quiet bitterness it hurt me to see.

I wanted to say: she had a lover. There was a romance in her life. The only phrases I could think of were words Anita would have chosen, bookish but magical.

“A friend,” said my mother in a flat, emotionless tone.

“A man,” I said. Saying it like that I had to imagine this man, this shadowy figure with a penis.

“A man she wouldn’t tell us about,” she said, not agreeing with me, just letting me know she was paying attention.

That sounded bad. Anita was so frank with her opinions. The man would have to be someone she knew none of us would like or approve of. Someone almost frightening, I thought, someone who would convince her to hide from her family.

“Do you think I should call Detective Waterman?”

“Detective Waterman is very busy,” she said, in a tone of mild scorn.

Her tone surprised me. I had assumed that my mother would appreciate Detective Waterman’s efforts, and admire her as a fellow professional, a woman in a tough line of work. “I thought Detective Waterman seemed pretty nice,” I said, hating my feeble choice of words.

My mother was about to say something ironic, but she stopped herself. She put her hand over mine. “This happens all the time,” she said.

I knew what she was saying, but maybe it was my turn to play stupid.

My mother softened her voice even further, as though we had been disagreeing and now were getting back to normal. “Anita is missing. She might come home right this minute.” She couldn’t keep from pausing, to see if the front door was opening, steps hurrying into the living room. “We have to do what we think is right.”

One of the thick magazines was open to an article, “Earthquakes and the Geologic Record.” The author was Frances Tilling Buchanan, my mother. I knew how pleased she would have been on an ordinary day, how we all might go out to dinner at Jack London Square to celebrate. Now she folded a Post-it and put it into place, closing the magazine so she could look at it later.

“That’s great,” I said, my voice a feeble copy of the congratulations I would usually have given her.

“The article explains that some of the Bay Area hills are upside down,” she said. Sometimes she does this. She’ll be walking along a hillside and suddenly say, “What an explosion!” She’s referring to something that happened ten million years ago, the debris, eroded lava at her feet.

“One big earthquake and a whole mountain flipped?” I heard myself ask. I was using the voice of a much younger person, trying to stir up her mood, trying to get her thinking.

“More or less,” she said.

I called Detective Waterman and left a message after the beep, telling her I would be at the factory most of the day. I felt like my father, briefly. He never leaves a simple message. His messages say he’ll be at the factory until noon, in L.A. until seven, and in Chicago tomorrow.

Then I took the bus down to the factory. It was Saturday, but a half crew was laboring, and the shipping department was crazy, two trucks waiting. The standard-sized boxes ran out, and so the shipping people had to make cartons out of great sheets of cardboard.

They cut the cardboard with a grip-razor, a handle with a dazzling-sharp edge sticking out of one end. One slash and half the cardboard fell away. A bend or two, and a nearly entire box stood there, waiting to be taped up. They sealed a carton around each night-stand, with padding at the edges, strips of a new kind of foam rubber, biodegradable. Although I wasn’t as fast as some of the workers, a little nervous about cutting myself, after a while I picked up speed.

The buzzer sounded for lunch break and I headed for Dad’s office. He was not there. Barbara was in the office, tapping the eraser end of a pencil on the computer screen. She had arranged the pink while-you-were-out slips into rows. She waved a pink message slip at me, and I took it.

Detective Waterman had returned my call. There were two numbers where I could reach her, and I tried both of them, trying not to disturb any of the papers on my dad’s desk.

“Waterman,” she said when she answered the second number.

Something about answering the phone like that sounds so impressive. No “Hello,” no “Can I help you?” Just a last name. I explained who I was and why I had called.

“Diaries can be the key,” said the detective.

As I described the words, the few phrases, she said, “Uh-huh” and, “Is that right,” but she didn’t say, “I have to get my hands on that diary.”

“It’s good to keep our minds open,” she said at last. She was starting a car and releasing the parking brake as she talked; I could tell by the background noise.

“Ask if anyone saw her getting into a car,” I suggested. “Walking along the street with a man.” I almost added: holding hands. “She must have gone someplace with whoever it was.” She must have loved him.

I knew it sounded lame, and I couldn’t keep the frustration and disappointment out of my voice.

“If you come up with a name,” said the detective. “A phone number. An address. You are not wasting my time, Cray. And you aren’t wasting yours, either. Keep thinking.”