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

her ear. “Take this down to Derrick,” she said.
    I didn’t want to take it, but I did, and I didn’t stop to glance into Anita’s room when I passed the door.

12
    Dad was standing in the front doorway, full daylight through the open door, morning clouds burned away.
    â€œYou better go talk to Mom,” I said.
    He turned, looked me a question, and I handed him Anita’s blue address book.
    He opened it very carefully. It was a new book, the most recent in Anita’s long history of phone numbers. The pages turned stiffly. Anita had very correct printing, made for keeping records, filling out forms. She knew a lot of people.
    Even upside down I could make out familiar names, Kyle Anderson right at the beginning of the book. One summer, when I was nine, Anita had pretended she was a librarian. She made library cards for each of us, and kept records, checking out old Scientific Americans to Dad.
    â€œLook through here and see if—” He couldn’t complete the thought. He wanted me to see if there was a name I didn’t recognize, or a name I did, someone dangerous, mysteriously attractive.
    â€œWe shouldn’t be looking at her stuff,” I said.
    â€œWho is this?” said Dad, showing me a name, Dr. Coors, with an address on Piedmont Avenue. I turned the pages of the address book, hearing Anita’s exasperated whisper in my mind. When she was annoyed she dropped her voice to a hiss. She didn’t like to shout. She would understand when she saw how tired we looked. We didn’t know what else to do.
    â€œWho is Dr. Coors?” asked Dad, demanding. He wanted Dr. Coors to be the name we were looking for, a shadowy doctor, specializing in street drugs.
    Dr. Coors had very blond, nearly white, curly hair up and down his arms. “He gave Bronto his shots,” I said.
    Dad took the stairs three at a time, hurrying to talk to Mom. I followed more slowly and stopped at Anita’s room.
    Mother had been everywhere, tugging drawers, opening files. Boxes were open, old videos and comic books, remains of Anita’s childhood, scattered across the floor. Mom was good at this sort of thing. Even the mess was more organized than it looked, her old jump ropes in a pile with her obsolete, worn-out Ping-Pong paddles and brightly colored tennis balls.
    A diary was open beside a stack of old report cards. Mother had no right to look at this, and there it was, spread open in the morning sun.
    I sat on the bed. Anita’s graduation picture was on a far shelf. It didn’t really look like her. There was a school district rule for those photos—everyone had to wear the same sweater, a similar pearl necklace. I was going to have my own graduation portrait snapped in a few weeks, a jacket and tie, “preferably a dark tie and a gray-to-dark jacket, navy blue allowable.”
    I don’t know who sets this kind of policy. But the result is that graduates, photographed almost a full year before, look a little bit like strangers, people smiling while they hold their breath. Here was this richly colored portrait of Anita, her chin down, her eyes steady, the mandatory smile. She had worn jeans to the photographer’s, and paint-spattered tennis shoes without laces, well-dressed only from the waist up.
    When the pictures came in the mail, in those stiff cardboard, do-not-bend envelopes, she had threatened to burn them. As a joke. I think she liked the one we all picked out. And I wondered if this is how Anita might look to a stranger, a lecher in a passing car, someone who didn’t even know her name.
    Every time I looked at the clock, I could not believe how slowly time passed.
    When the phone rang, someone snatched it eagerly, but it was always only Anita’s boss or Jesse, reassuring Dad but having to call him four times between six-thirty and eight forty-five to get straight on what had to be done with the hopper, when the fire inspector was