30

The call came just before dinner, tuna and mushroom soup over flat noodles. I made it myself, and stirred in some frozen peas toward the end. Mom came down from her office and shook some dried parsley flakes over it, and then rummaged in the cupboard and found a little red-and-white metal box of paprika.

It was good to see my mother taking an interest in helping, because usually she sat sideways and ate without talking, and then later, when my dad was on the computer in his study, sending messages to his Find the Children friends, she would be in the kitchen again, eating chocolate pudding out of the container, or asparagus soup, right out of the can.

She sat at the table, sideways, looking off at the collection of kitchen knives on the wall, boning knives, paring, carving, butcher, all of them lined up in no order, right next to the tool with a handle like a knife, but not a knife at all, a rod like a file, for sharpening the carbon-steel edges.

I spooned the mixture onto plates, and we were just sitting down, when Dad’s phone made its electronic burble. It was a new system, a fax machine-answering machine combo, with a huge memory so Dad could listen to fifty messages at once. He had bought it at Whole Earth that week, and installed it in the kitchen, right under the calendar.

He picked it up, holding his paper napkin in one hand, and listened, and my insides tightened. Even before he was off the phone, my mother and I could tell this was not just another phone call.

He said, “Yes, Detective Waterman,” in a stiff-sounding way, letting us know who he had on the phone. He listened, and his face went slack, nerveless, and not pale so much as shiny, a sickly light just under his skin.

He cupped the receiver in one hand, the napkin drifting to his feet. He told us the news after getting ready, working out the words in his head. “They won’t be able to make positive identification because they don’t have dental records.”

No explanation, just that opening sentence, but we had already guessed what had happened.

My mother didn’t say anything.

“The detective is giving us an interim report,” said my father, cupping the phone. It was only then that he told us about Skyline Boulevard, and the phrase dead at least a month came out of his mouth like something he hadn’t really said, words in a balloon, like in the comics, his lips half-parted but not moving.

My mother got up and dragged the chair over to the telephone, a gray Panasonic with a memory that could hold fax messages, voice messages, and half a ream of paper. She took the phone from my father, but my father didn’t back away.

Detective Waterman was saying something, and my mother didn’t shake or nod her head the way my dad did when he was on the phone. She absorbed the words and replied, “I have them here,” as she leaned against the back of the chair.

My father blinked.

I carried the plates full of food over to the sink, clearing the table, slipping the unused paper napkins into the trash can under the sink.

“They are current dental records,” my mother said, being patient, spacing out her words, the way she sounded when she explained to someone that the fossil record goes back hundreds of millions of years, not just back to Noah’s Flood.

When my mother hung up, she felt around for the chair, and sat. Without looking in my direction, she said, “In my office, in the right-hand drawer, in the red plastic folder.”

I was upstairs at once, past Anita’s room, and in the doorway of my mother’s office. By then I really understood what I was looking for, and I sat in my mother’s desk chair, looking at the dust cover she always draped over the computer when she wasn’t using the office, trying to calm myself down, trying not to make a mistake.

That was how I thought of it, the way my mother did. She knew that if we are careful, if we collect and store and file we will keep mistakes from being made, keep harm from happening. I knew why she had asked Dr. Ames, our dentist, to send these.

I found the red folder in the big drawer, the one that rolled out heavy, full of papers. I did not open the folder until I was downstairs, and then I thought—what if the folder is empty?

My father took off his slippers and put on dress shoes, rolling down his shirt sleeves, although they were still wrinkled where he had rolled them up. My mother put on a big wool jacket, and slung her leather bag with the strap over her shoulder, both of them getting ready, no one saying anything.

I made sure the stove was off, the black heating coils all cool. Once I had left a pot holder on a burner that was not all the way off and the quilted pad got a little tan along one edge. I locked the front door behind us. I thought I should bring something to read. I imagined myself in a waiting room, like waiting for an operation to be over, needing a story to make the time pass.

I rode in the back of the Jeep, looking backward, an experience I had always found enjoyable. The seat was bolted to the floor and had a seat buckle with a shoulder strap, and the arms of the seat had hard foam-rubber grips. You could hang on as the Jeep drove up and down canyons, that was the theory. But I found myself hanging on with one hand, even though the ride was smooth, my dad taking it easy on the clutch, all the way downhill, to the freeway.

In the other hand, I held the red folder. I did not have to open it again to visualize what was inside. The folder held black-and-white film paper clipped to sheets of paper, photos of molars and their roots, the silhouettes gray, like mountains captured by moonlight.

Anita told me she liked the peppermint flavor of the Novocain, the squeak of Dr. Ames’s rubber gloves, being brave after the fact. She had had only one filling in her entire life and it was there in a follow-up X ray, a jagged empty star at the crown of one tooth.