The Nobodies Album (6 page)

“Yeah, you too,” he says. I start to gather our trash from the table.

He picks up his bag and his phone and looks toward the door. “Well, have a good flight back. You have my number.” I don’t want him to go, I want to keep him here, but there’s nothing to do about that. He wouldn’t tell me anything anyway. “Bye,” he calls, without looking back. The bell over the door jingles.

I sit back down, even though I’ve already thrown away my coffee. I try to go over the conversation I’ve just had, but everything seems slippery. There’s nothing to grasp. I lift the sugar bowl from the box. It’s identical to the one Joe broke all those years ago. I remember spooning sugar from that bowl onto my oatmeal when I was a child, and spooning it onto Milo’s cornflakes a blink of an eye later. It really does look the same. It’s almost like having the old one back.

I lift the lid to check for chips, and as I look down into the smooth white curve of the interior I see something inside, a piece of paper folded into a small, thick wedge. I try to reach in to grab it, but my hand is too big for the delicate opening. I turn the bowl over, dumping the paper onto the table. I unfold it to find three words written in careful block letters. The ink is black, and whoever wrote the words went over them several times with the pen.

Oh, for Christ’s sake. What kind of a B movie is this? Three words. “Someone is lying.”

who cares if he did it? pareidolia rocks!!!!!!

Comment from a message board on FreeMilo.com, Thursday, November 11

Chapter Three

My first impulse after finding the note is to call Joe right away, but I remember that he’s on his way to a meeting and won’t want to be disturbed. And the absurd spy-novel nature of this transaction makes me wonder if there’s some reason he doesn’t want to discuss this with me directly. I can’t for the life of me think why he would sit with me for half an hour, saying nothing of any import, then pass me this cryptic message in such an oblique way. Did he think someone would be watching us? I look around the café, but no one seems to be paying any attention to me. What made him think I would look inside the bowl right away? I might well have put it in my suitcase, carried it home, and not opened it up until the next time I decided to have a tea party. And above all, why go to all this trouble to convey something so vague? “Someone is lying” isn’t exactly “Colonel Mustard in the conservatory with a candlestick.” Maybe he’s gotten eccentric in his celebrity, and this is just his preferred method of communication. Maybe I should write the word “Who?” on a piece of paper and pass it to him in a coffee creamer.

Carrying the box gingerly back to my hotel, I try to convince myself that the note means nothing. Joe said that he hasn’t had the thing for very long; the note was probably already in its hiding place, left over from a game of charades two or three owners ago, when Joe’s girlfriend received the sugar bowl from some anonymous eBay seller.

But.

I wonder for a moment if it could be a message smuggled to me from Milo, but I realize immediately that that’s pure fantasy. Milo is, for the moment, a free man. If he has something to tell me, there are more direct ways he could do it.

Back in my room, I place Joe’s gift on the dresser and lie down once more across the bed. It’s late afternoon and I’m exhausted. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now. If this were a mystery novel, the note in the sugar bowl would spur me to take some action. With my child’s life in the balance, I would charge forward and begin investigating the case on my own. I would track down waiters and convenience store clerks; I would visit seedy nightclubs and interview the victim’s friends. More clues would follow: there would be a bellboy at my hotel who would turn out to have an unusual connection to the crime; a stranger would hold a door open for me, then press a phone number into my hand as I passed through. Everyone would have an easily describable quirk. And the murderer would turn out to be the last person anyone would suspect.

I fall asleep wondering how good a writer I would have to be to bring us to a happy ending.

•  •  •

There’s a story I haven’t been able to get out of my head, one you might have heard: A family of three, by all appearances happy and self-contained, falls prey to an intruder. A thief enters their home and ransacks their belongings, leaving the family’s most vulnerable member, their beloved child, hungry and bereft. Happily, the mother and father rise up and do what is right: they eject the invader, thereby protecting their child and maintaining the careful balance of their lives. Is there any parent who wouldn’t do the same?

During the months after my daughter, Rosemary, was born, Milo asked to hear the story of the Three Bears at least five times a day. Mitch and I were pleased at how well Milo seemed to have adjusted to the presence of the new baby, but we did notice that he clung to small rituals in ways he hadn’t before, wanting to keep his baseball cap on even in the bathtub and insisting that his cereal be served in the same bowl every day. (This is only one of a hundred scalpel-edged memories I’ve been scraping myself with over the past few days; the image of Milo, small and worried in his red cap, never fails to break the skin.) The Three Bears became a part of our daily cadence in those months, as regular as feedings and diaper changes.

Somewhere around the three- or four-hundredth reading, it occurred to me that I had never before noticed the subtext of this story, the ancient familial rites of betrayal and reassurance that get played out within its narrative.
The baby will wear your old clothes
, we tell our children;
she’ll sleep in your old bed, and we’re proud you’re such a big boy that you don’t need them anymore
. Fuck that, the story says. Three is enough for any family. And no matter how many times the narration is interrupted by the screeching cry that belies the story’s message, no matter how distracted your mother seems as she recites the words from memory while fastening the soft little leech to her breast, the ending is always the same. Baby Bear always wins.

Children, with their feral sweetness: it can break your heart. Once I understood, I made an effort to put the baby down in her crib or on a blanket before sitting down with Milo to read the story, so that he could lean into me, sad little turnip, without finding that my arms were occupied by somebody else. But the truth was—and maybe I already knew it—that this was a balancing act I would never quite get right. In the metaphor of the family romance, when you fall in love with a second child, does it mean you’re betraying the first? Sometimes it feels that way. And sometimes, holed up in bed with my new little one—sleeping, nursing, sleeping, while Mitch attended to Milo’s more complicated needs and questions and occasional tyrannies—I enjoyed the illicit pleasure of it.

Every moment leads to every other. Volcanoes don’t erupt without warning, and now, in this new Pompeii, my task is to sift through the levels of ash and pumice to find artifacts of lives lived before the disaster. Do I believe it’s possible that Milo killed Bettina? I don’t know; I really don’t. I have no idea when it is that I stopped knowing him utterly, which moment marks my first failure of maternal empathy. And so I examine; and so I dig. And in the ruins of my memory, I find evidence that supports both versions of history.

•  •  •

I wake up in that state of grief where you can tell you’ve been mourning even in your sleep. I’ve been dreaming of Milo as a child, in a series of fragmentary scenarios: Milo hot with fever, Milo digging a hole, Milo lost in a crowd. It’s just after four a.m., and I’m pretty sure I’m up for the day.

Apparently room service doesn’t begin until six, so I brew weak coffee with the machine provided in my bathroom and sit to drink it in an armchair in the corner. I feel agitated; I can’t stand the hush, the middle-of-the-night solitude. I’m too distracted to read, and turning on the television feels like an assault, so I turn to the new-world cure for loneliness: I open up my laptop.

I’d like, I suppose, some comfort or fellowship, but I’m not sure how to find it. I type my troubles into a search engine like it’s a diary. I find articles about murderers from every corner of the world and about the million ways their mothers pray for them, but nothing that tells me how I can make this situation more bearable. Finally, steeling myself, I type in “Milo Frost.” I just want to see a picture of his face.

An onslaught of horrible links follows—news stories, blog screeds, one site that purports to have video of Bettina’s body being taken away in a bag—but one phrase catches my eye: FreeMilo.com. I click.

The site is profoundly distasteful, I can see that right away—it bills itself as “out to protect our boy Milo, whether he killed the bitch or not”—but I’m fascinated by it. I browse the message boards, which cover topics ranging from fairly cogent analyses of the facts that have been made public to speculations about which Pareidolia song would be the best soundtrack for murder. There’s an entire thread devoted to the band’s name: what it means, which band member chose it, whether it might shed any light on the current situation. Here, at least, I feel I have a little more insight than the average reader. I’m the one who taught him the word.

Pareidolia describes the human tendency to find meaning where there is none. Take the man in the moon, for example: we raise our eyes, and there, in lifeless markings of bedrock and basalt, we find a human face. We’re hardwired to look for patterns in the Rorschach of the natural world: a woman’s reclining form in the curve of a mountain range, the Virgin Mary in a water stain on a concrete wall. We want the world to be both known and mysterious. We’re looking for evidence of God, or maybe just for company.

When Milo was small and afraid of the dark, Mitch told him that he didn’t have to worry because the man in the moon was always just outside his room, looking out for him. Milo’s bed was under a window, and sometimes I’d catch sight of the two of them looking out, checking to make sure that the pale gatekeeper was still out there, keeping watch. (Note where I am, by the way: not quite in the scene and not quite out. That was me as I often was in those days, hovering in doorways, unsure how to move in and sweep up my child as confidently as Mitch seemed to. Always happy for him to be doing the work, so I could have a moment to myself. “Time to myself,” that grail forever sought and lost by mothers of young children—that was what I thought I lacked back then. I was always waiting for Mitch to come home or the babysitter to arrive so I could slip away to spend a clandestine hour inside my own mind. And then, coming upon the two of them in a moment as sweet as that one, I’d stand and observe, my heart in my throat, my arms hanging empty. Sometimes I’d even snap a picture.)

Later, maybe a year after Mitch and Rosemary died, I went into Milo’s room to see if he was ready for bed, and I found him looking out the window. “What
is
the man in the moon?” he asked. “I mean, really.”

He would have been about ten, I think. Too old for Santa and the Easter Bunny, but still willing to play along with the ruse of the tooth fairy. He’d shown some interest in science and astronomy, so I told him what I could about the surface of the moon, and I explained the idea of pareidolia. He listened and nodded and asked questions. And I never saw him look out his bedroom window at the moon again.

The FreeMilo Web site continues to disgust me, and I continue to read it. What amazes me most is that these people—mostly young men, I assume—think they know my son. They’ve pieced together a man from song lyrics, videos, fragments of interviews, and they believe it’s genuinely Milo. Not that I can be so sure I know him much better, I suppose; I’ve just built my version of him from a larger sample of material.

I’m almost ready to put an end to this unhealthy gorging when I see a new headline, screaming at me from the top of the list: VIDEO OF THE MURDER HOUSE—BEFORE THE MURDER!!!

The Murder House. Of course, I’ve never been to Milo’s house, and it hadn’t yet occurred to me that it would now take on this added significance. I know that houses where murders take place become stops on a gruesome pilgrimage route, and I wonder if there are people there—right now, a matter of blocks from here—camping out alongside the yellow crime-scene tape, taking pictures and toasting the dead. I wonder if the house will be demolished eventually. Sometimes they are, more for real estate reasons than symbolic ones: the property values, the privacy of the neighbors, the decency of letting the dead rest. Still, it has the feel of an ancient rite. Purification by fire. On this site, blood was spilled.

I click on the subject heading. Inside, there’s a link, accompanied by the following explanation: “My cousin’s a film editor on
Turf Wars
, and he got this amazing footage of a Milo/Bettina episode that was supposed to air next month. They filmed it three weeks ago. It’s a rough cut, so it’s not as smooth as it would be if it were actually on TV. Check it out!!!!”

Turf Wars
, I know, is a TV program that showcases rock stars’ homes. In each episode, two different celebrities lead the cameras on tours of their houses; afterward, viewers call in to vote on which house they like better. I’ve seen this show once or twice, and I’ve wondered, who are these children, and why are they living by themselves? They don’t seem fully formed somehow, even the ones in their forties who are already doing comeback tours. Video game rooms and waterfalls, ceilings painted with stars and clouds. Gold fixtures and shark tanks. Rooms full of shoes. I didn’t know Milo was slated to appear, though in the past I’ve followed the show’s listings carefully in the hope I might get to see where he lived.

I click the link, and my computer’s video player pops up. I press Play.

The clip begins with a shot of a white stucco house against a blue sky. It’s a Spanish mission–style building with a red tile roof and a wrought-iron gate. It’s a beautiful house, but I can’t imagine the process by which Milo would have chosen it above any other. I try to imagine Milo house hunting, ticking off his preferences for a real estate agent. It’s as foreign an idea as seeing him in a military uniform or a ball gown.

The camera lands on the door, a tall, imposing thing made of dark wood and intricately carved. The door opens a crack and Milo sticks his head out. “Yeah,” he says. “I’ll take two boxes of Thin Mints.”

A prickle of nerve endings at the sight of him. A muted ache in my belly. The camera pulls back and Milo opens the door wider. He’s wearing a ratty maroon T-shirt with the word “Fizz” written on it—I’m not sure whether that’s the name of a band or some kind of product or simply an ironic statement I don’t understand. He’s wearing jeans and a dark wool hat, and he’s barefoot. You can see how tall he is—lanky. He’s looking down into the camera, which must be held by a cameraman of average height. Milo steps backward and gestures us in.