Zero at the Bone by Michael Cadnum Read Free Book Online Page A

awkward about what I’m wearing.
    These days I tended to wear a large gray sweatshirt to bed, but I still had to pull on a pair of pants to make myself fit for company. Dragging on the pants made this all the more significant—there was something going on.
    I padded down the stairs in my bare feet. The wooden steps were cold. The lights were on the living room, every single lamp, but there was no one there, only rumpled places in the chair and the sofa, impressions of their weight.
    My dad had just put the telephone down, and he was looking at me without seeing me.
    â€œWhat’s happening?” I said.
    â€œDad was calling BART police,” said Mom.
    I didn’t like the way that sounded, and a very bad feeling flickered in my stomach. Then it was gone, and with a certain tenseness in my body I felt myself grow just a little stupid as a form of protection.
    Bay Area Rapid Transit is a subway system. BART has its own police department. It is its own world—you buy a ticket and you enter transit land, scenery blurring by.
    â€œThe Oakland Police Department suggested it,” said my mom, sounding overly calm, someone reading lines from a book. She didn’t have to tell me. Anita wasn’t home yet.
    â€œIt’s only one o’clock,” I said. “She’s late.” I meant: She’s been late before. That wasn’t quite true. She was rarely this late.
    â€œThat’s right,” she said, not looking at me. “She must have gone somewhere with Kyle.”
    Anita always called when she was even a few minutes late. Anita was impatient with the rest of us, but she played by a certain set of rules: Write letters, make phone calls, don’t eat any more red meat than you have to.
    I wondered if there had been an accident, one of the trains derailing. Sometimes someone jumps onto the tracks on purpose or by accident, the electric third rail cooking them stiff. These were my thoughts, but I heard my dad say, “The OPD says she hasn’t been gone long enough for us to file a missing persons report. But they took her description anyway, because of her age.”
    â€œShe’s only running a little behind,” Mom said, like someone referring to a train schedule. “God knows I was late all the time,” she said, looking off to one side, like she could see herself twenty years ago. “I bet I took years off my dad’s life,” she said, without much sadness, but philosophically, puzzled by historical fact.
    Anita worked near the MacArthur BART station. She would travel past the Nineteenth Street Station, Twelfth Street, Lake Merritt, and get off at Fruitvale. She would take the bus up into the hills. Dad had hated the plan, because of all the street crime, but she had found the job on her own and was even joining a union.
    â€œMaybe she made some new friends,” Mom was saying. “They stopped by after work.”
    Stopped by for a drink, she meant, or a cup of coffee. That didn’t sound like Anita. The legal drinking age is twenty-one, although Anita could pass for older in bad light. Anita drank coffee a little, after dinner at a nice restaurant. But she made friends slowly, like me. Maybe she was changing. But this sounded like a fantasy that belonged to Mom’s vision of the world, not Anita’s.
    Mom had friends, went out, drank caffe lattes in San Francisco. Anita was always in a hurry somewhere, running her fingers through her hair or giving it a toss to swing it out of her eyes.
    â€œShe was supposed be home at ten,” Dad said. He did not look sleepy, and he had combed his hair. He was dressed in slacks and a fresh shirt, but he was barefooted, like me.
    â€œIt’s very inconsiderate,” said Mom, not looking at either of us.
    â€œWhat’s the name of her manager?” Dad asked both of us. This was a word out of Dad’s way of life: manager. If you needed help, you talked to the person in charge.
    I