Free Zero at the Bone by Michael Cadnum Page A

the man who was with her sat in my dad’s favorite easy chair, leaning forward. He was quiet the way a Seeing Eye dog is, an important shadow. He had tiny pockmarks all over his cheeks. Both visitors were on edge, like they were going to start a footrace right there in the living room.
    â€œNice plants,” said the man with the pinholes all over his face.
    â€œI really admire someone with a green thumb,” said Detective Waterman, both cops ready to play a game of Small Talk. She asked me my name and I told her. “The plants belong to my mother,” I said as I went to get Dad.
    My dad had heard them come in. He hurried to finish a phone call, and as soon as he hung up, he looked at my feet, afraid to catch my expression. “What did they say?”
    I wanted to tell them all that it was too early to have the police sitting around in the dining room. I wanted to tell them everything he had done up to now was way too fast.
    We all needed to slow down. I had the feeling we could punch a rewind button or pull the plug on the machine that made all the clocks run forward. Anita would be here, with something she had found, an old license plate she thought Dad would like, or a lizard skin, like the one she found last summer, like a plastic cutout with four legs.
    I wanted to say all this, but all I said was, “They just want you and Mom.” I couldn’t bring myself to make another sound. This might be it, I knew. This might be the news my mother and dad had been afraid of since Anita was born. It was the news I was afraid of whenever my dad was late coming home, whenever my mom’s plane was delayed.
    I also wanted to add that they were both calm, nice. Nice is an important word. I like quiet, soft-voiced people. I did not feel they were here with bad news, but I could not be sure. Maybe they had especially pleasant cops deliver very bad news.
    Dad left me, hurrying into the living room. One of the strands of my mother’s coffee plant draped over Detective Waterman’s shoulder.
    â€œThere’s no news about your daughter,” said Detective Waterman, a tiny drop of water from the leaves soaking into her jacket.
    My mother appeared at the top of the stairs. “There’s no news,” my father repeated, to my mother, to all of us. It was almost wonderful—no bad news. And then the tiredness came back all over again.
    My mother had put on a dress she never wore, something with a sash, a sea green cloth that looked all wrong this time of day. No one can change her appearance as dramatically as my mother. Most of the time she looks like a frumpy ranch hand, someone who could shoot a buffalo in her spinach-omelette bathrobe. Now she looked like a weary hostess. She extended her hand and thanked them for coming over, like they were new neighbors.
    â€œMissing Persons and Juvenile work hand in hand,” said Detective Waterman. “On weekends we work out of the same office.” She said this just as she took my mother’s hand, as if the two of them were acting out a skit, “The Inner Workings of the Oakland Police.”
    It was not a weekend, I wanted to say. It was Friday.
    They all followed my father into his den. There was a table over to one side, covered with photos of Anita.
    My dad’s den is a room of shelves and books, a television only he watches, a small Sony perched on a pile of old magazines. The wall is decorated with maps of faraway islands, atolls, and reefs.
    I didn’t like the man with the pinprick holes in his face. He looked at me from over by the maple accent table, an item Ziff used to make until earlier that year. The cop looked at me again after a few moments, keeping his finger on a picture of Anita on her seventeenth birthday. She was wearing a sweatshirt and cutoff Levi’s. I had been in charge of the camera that day. The picture was a little blurred, the camera strap a fuzzy gray caterpillar at one corner of the photo.
    I