“They’re good,” he says. “My dad’s retiring next year.”
“Good for him,” I say.
“Are you still in the same place?” he asks. I nod.
“I always liked that house,” he says, and I have a sudden flash of an image, Milo and Joe sitting on the carpet in front of the TV, video game controllers clutched so tightly their knuckles were pale. In the very room where I sat last night and watched my son move across the screen in handcuffs.
I sigh, and Joe sips his coffee. The conversation is stagnating, but I’m not sure what I can ask him. How’s the band going? is clearly not the right question. We sit in silence for a few moments, drinking our coffee studiously.
“Without asking about the case,” I say, “can I ask about Milo?”
“I guess so,” says Joe. “What do you want to know?”
I think about it. How does this happen? That’s one thing I want to know. How is it possible that we find ourselves in this situation? And, did he kill Bettina? And, will I ever lay eyes on him again without a screen of television glass between us?
“Well, whatever you want to tell me, I guess. How was he before all this happened? Just anything. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen him.”
“Before this,” Joe says. He sounds almost wistful, as if he’s forgotten such a time existed. “He was okay, I guess. He was … I don’t know. He’s, you know … Milo.”
I look down at the paper cup in my hands, the cardboard sleeve around its middle. I feel suddenly that I might cry. Of course. He’s just Milo.
“What was Bettina like?” I ask. What I really mean is, what was Milo like when he was with her, but that seems to veer too closely to danger territory.
He doesn’t say anything for a minute. “Honestly, I was never crazy about her,” he says. “God, that sounds awful after all this.”
I shrug. “You don’t have to start liking someone just because they’re dead. What didn’t you like about her?”
“She was just annoying. She was kind of childish, always throwing tantrums when she didn’t get her way. And she was very possessive of Milo. Not that he minded—he was way too into her, and I could never really figure out why.”
He stops talking. I think he thinks he’s gone too far. I don’t want him to be uncomfortable, but I’d give any amount of money to know his definition of “way too into her.”
“So how’s the writing going?” he asks. He wants to talk about something else.
“Okay,” I say. I feel like I’m sitting in a cloud of anxiety as it is, and I don’t want to think about The Nobodies Album waiting in my editor’s inbox. I wonder instead if the publishing company will be sending me a sympathy fruit basket or something. I wonder if I’ll be staying here long enough for it to molder on the porch before I get home. “Fine.”
“I read one of your books a couple of summers ago,” he says, livening a little. “The one … the ghost story, if you can call it that. The one about the guy who had been on the Titanic when he was a kid.”
“Carpathia,” I say.
“Right. It was really good.”
“Thanks,” I say. “I’m glad you liked it.”
“It was crazy, though—just having it in my house was all cloak-and-dagger. I had to hide it every time Milo came over, to make sure he didn’t see it.” He laughs, as if it’s cute that my son can’t even stand to lay eyes on something I’ve written.
I drink the last of my coffee and set the cup on the table. Casting about for a new topic, I ask if he has a girlfriend. He does, which I already knew—a woman named Chloe, who has a young daughter from a previous relationship. She designs jewelry and sells it online. And we’re back to silence.
I’m about to ask if his parents’ cockatoo is still alive, but at the same moment Joe says, “I have something for you.”
He picks up his messenger bag from where he’s dropped it under the table. When he opens it, I can see the edge of a laptop, a coiled cord, some papers, two CDs. And a square white gift box, which he pulls out and hands to me.
“You’re kidding,” I say. “Really?”
“Yup,” he says. He smiles for the first time since he sat down. “Just a little something.”
I open the box and find a porcelain sugar bowl painted with yellow roses. My mother’s pattern.
“Oh, Joe,” I say. A thread of warmth snakes through me. I’m truly touched. “This is lovely. I can’t believe you did this.”
“Yeah, well,” he says, looking embarrassed. “I always felt bad about breaking it. I actually thought right away that I wanted to get you a new one. I saved a little piece of the one that broke—I put it in my pocket while we were cleaning it up, so I’d have something with the pattern on it. But I never did anything about it. And then, after the band started making money, I was buying presents like crazy—it was a little insane, actually, like I bought my mom a car, and I got my dad this signed baseball that cost twenty-five hundred dollars.”
I smile and try to look charmed. Milo never sent me anything.
“So anyway, I remembered that I always wanted to replace the sugar bowl, and it became like my life’s mission to track one down. Milo was no help—he didn’t know the name of the pattern or who made it or anything, but I still had that little broken piece, and eventually I figured out the details. You know they don’t make this stuff anymore?”
I nod. “I almost never use my pieces anymore because they’re so hard to replace.”
“Yeah. I’d pretty much given up. With everything that happened between you and Milo, it would’ve seemed weird to just send you a sugar bowl out of the blue.”
Weird. I guess I would have thought it was. It’s very sweet, but it’s well beyond what you might expect from a man his age. I think he might have had a bit of a crush on me when he was a teenager.
“So how’d you end up finding it?”
“Chloe finally tracked one down online. She likes those kind of challenges, so she’d do searches from time to time. It actually just arrived this morning.”
“Wow,” I say, rather inelegantly. I nestle the bowl in its tissue paper. “Well, thank you. I really love it. It’s a great gift.”
“Well, good. I’m glad.” He pulls his phone out of his pocket, checks the time. “I’ve got to go,” he says. “I’ve got a meeting with our manager at four. We’ve got to figure out what the rest of the band is going to do until all this is resolved. We’ve got tour dates to cancel … it’s a mess.” We stand up. “How long are you out here for?”
“Not long. Not much I can do if he won’t even talk to me.”
“It’s still good you came, I think,” says Joe. “Even though he won’t see you.”
I look at him. “Really?” I say.
“Yeah. For what it’s worth, I think he’s being a prick. He could use having you around right now.”
I reach up to hug him again, run a hand through his bristly hair like a mother might do. He’s always had beautiful hair, dark and thick. Wasted on a boy, my grandmother would have said. “It was great to see you,” I say. “Take care of yourself.”
“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.”
The Nobodies Album Page 5