Free Zero at the Bone by Michael Cadnum

coming.
    â€œUntil she comes home,” my dad said, concluding each phone call. He’s almost the only person I know who doesn’t say good-bye when he hangs up. He ends phone calls like someone in a movie, just dropping the receiver.
    â€œKyle is coming by,” said Dad after another phone call.
    â€œKyle is coming to tell us what he knows,” I said. “He changed his mind. Decided to be helpful.” I had changed my mind about wanting to see Kyle. I didn’t want to see him, and I did not want Kyle here. My family was wounded, tired, and I didn’t want to see Kyle’s hard little eyes.
    Kyle was probably stopping by to amuse himself. His own life was too boring. I knew we had always seemed colorful to him, everyone always in a rush. Nobody hurried in Kyle’s family.
    â€œHe just said he wanted to share the worry,” said Dad. “He’ll be by as soon as he drives his dad back from an appointment with his doctor.”
    â€œI don’t want to see him,” I said.
    Dad didn’t seem to hear me. He paged through the address book. He had called several people, interrupting breakfasts, finding that people had already left for work. It was harder than calling hospitals.
    Usually the person he called knew who my dad was, but he didn’t know them, so there was a friendly, cheerful aspect to the call, talk about the weather, the lack of rain. What made it worse, my dad said more than once, laughing too energetically into the phone, was that all this worry might be totally unnecessary. She might be home any second.
    I had a bad thought, revolving around the words you hear in the news, “beyond recognition.” Maybe she had been in a fire, and her body had burned so badly it didn’t look like her.
    So I tried to have some other mental pictures—Anita on a ferry on the Bay, empty champagne glass in her hand. Anita sleeping off a wild party, innocently, curled up on a sofa, no head for alcohol. Anita waking and this very moment fumbling in her purse, finding coins, making the phone call.
    Breathless, full of apologies.
    We had all forgotten it. Only I remembered, and set the baked bread on the sink. It was honey brown, and still a little warm when I cupped my hands around it and really felt what was there.
    When there was a knock at the front door, I knew it was Anita, too embarrassed to pop right in, too guilty to run all the way upstairs to pee or take off some clothes that she couldn’t stand anymore, too tight, too hot.
    It was a woman I didn’t recognize, and a car parked at the curb, one of those light green, almost colorless sedans. She gave me a card like a salesperson, a business card imprinted with the familiar oak-tree silhouette. But she didn’t work for the school district. I gave the card a good look but still had trouble reading the words. I didn’t have to; I knew what she was.
    I thought that maybe this is how the news might come. If something terrible happened. If they found her, and the news was not good. The woman in a dark blue skirt and matching jacket asked to speak with Mr. or Mrs. Buchanan.
    I let her in.

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