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

story, Alice in Wonderland, someone pretty but imaginary.
    My dad had already called each hospital two or three times, and by the time I was asking the question the response was sympathetic but a little clipped, and one nurse told me she would call us if there was any word. But there was always a moment or two while the receptionist checked a list, surveyed a list of names, people who were brought in during the last hour.
    The entire house smelled like baking bread.
    For a while, I decided to play a sort of game. The game was: Pretend this is some other day, Anita in bed asleep. I went about a normal routine and took a shower, washing my hair with Breck’s baby shampoo. Anita had pointed out that it didn’t leave gunky conditioner in my hair, and it didn’t make me have to squint and grimace while I went about washing myself, which is supposed to be a pleasant experience.
    As soon as I turned off the water, I could tell nothing had changed. The silence felt the same. I opened the door of the bathroom, swirling steam slipping out into the hall, and listened. Dad had a radio on in the room he used as a den, where he kept his books and videotapes. A radio voice talked about the morning traffic, the Dumbarton Bridge closed westbound due to a big rig that had flipped.
    I dried my hair in the doorway to Mom’s room. I almost never walked all the way in. She sat at her desk, her head in her hands.
    Her office is like the headquarters of a successful expedition. At her elbow, beside the computer printer, was the top section of a Neanderthal skull. It was just the bony bowl of the cranium and the brow ridges, the eye sockets only half there. I had always felt the wonder of having such a relic in the house.
    Messages come in on the fax machine, by e-mail, questions from scientists in Boston, New York. My mother is an expert on the East Bay Hills. She is famous among ten people, and they all like to hear from her.
    My mother was at her desk, the way she would be all morning on a usual day. But it was too early, and she was not working. I knocked gently on the door.
    I couldn’t tell if she heard me.
    â€œMother?”
    She wasn’t weeping. Weeping would be better than this. She sat looking straight ahead, at the computer, the row of rodent jaws. It struck me how little my family looks at each other. Eye to eye.
    â€œYou want me to help a little later?” I asked.
    â€œHelp,” she said, saying the word like a foreign sound.
    â€œScreen some sand?”
    â€œI have about twenty pounds of it,” she said. She turned her head so I could see her profile. She had lost the weight too fast, I thought. Her neck skin was slack. Fossil collectors in the field often collect bone-rich earth by the bucketful. Sometimes I shook dirt through a screen, picking out the tiny ribs and teeth that sifted free.
    â€œI have to report to Jesse in the afternoon,” I said.
    We were doing really well. Like actors hired to play us in a movie, an early rehearsal, but none of us showing how scared we were. Our remarks didn’t fit together very well, but that didn’t matter. “Derrick won’t be going in to work,” she said.
    Of course not, I thought.
    â€œBut you might as well,” she said.
    My family had a rule about taking time off from school or work: you never did. Unless you were paralyzed or had major surgery. The Monday I spent home with my concussion, seeing double, was the first day I had spent home since eighth grade. I had been sick sometimes during those years, but I went to school with a fever more than once, and one spring I had poison oak so bad the school nurse sent me home.
    Dad never took time off. Not when he worked as a furniture designer in San Francisco, sixteen hours a day, planning a revolution in wicker. He won awards, made money, bought a factory, and now he could work every hour of the day if he wanted to.
    Mom picked a blue notebook off her desktop, and held it up by