The Nobodies Album

by Carolyn Parkhurst

  It created some awkward moments; there are some stories no one wants to hear. But I understood. It was a way of whittling down his grief into something he could control. Something he knew how to hold.

  Don’t make him a saint. He’s a little boy, and he’s lost as much as any of them. He’s angry, and he’s lonely. He yells when his mother gives him soup that burns his tongue. He laughs when his father gouges a toe on a loose nail in the floor. Sometimes it’s an accident, and sometimes he does it on purpose, to see if he can get that look: the one that says they’d be happier with a house as empty as everyone else’s.

  We were half a family, the two of us sliding along channels that didn’t quite meet. If it had been Rosemary, I would have known what she needed. Her grief would have been straightforward: sadness and guilt, spread open like pages.

  But Milo was a whirlwind of anger and terror. His pain was a pressure he needed to push against. He didn’t want to be held close, to have soft words murmured against the top of his head. He wanted to fight and roar and crush. He wanted to find out how much power he held. If it was enough to make other people feel as bad as he did.

  He’s better off, Theodor thinks, than some of the other children would have been if they’d been the one left behind. Most of the others don’t even make sense on their own. Would Ursula Schmitt resort to pulling her own hair if Rudi Hoster weren’t there to do it for her? Would Heiner Weiss cut off a dog’s tail so he’d have someone to tease?

  Children have their own logic in the same way that primitive cultures have their own cosmologies. It may seem flawed to those of us outside; we think we’ve advanced beyond it. We are sophisticated enough to know that the world doesn’t rest on the back of a turtle. But to a child, it’s airtight in its internal consistency. It’s not something you can argue with.

  When Theodor thinks about that day, he knows he should have seen what was coming. Knows he should have been able to prevent it. It wasn’t an ordinary day, even if it had seemed so at the time. He should have noticed that the sky was an unusual shade of blue. Should have known that something was different by the way the air was so still.

  So many signs: his foot had been itchy; he’d seen a dog carrying a dead goose, stolen from the poulterer’s stall; when he and his brother and sisters walked toward the square, he could see that their shadows all touched, while his stood apart. It provides little comfort, but he knows that if it happens again, he’ll know what to look for.

  What is the right way to respond to a child tearing the pages out of a bird-watching guide, because if it hadn’t been for the birds and the binoculars, he wouldn’t have been fighting with his sister at the moment she lost her balance?

  There weren’t that many options. I knew not to scold him or tell him to stop. I did one of the following things, just one. Did I (a) walk away, leaving him to destroy the book in private? (b) stand in his doorway with my face in my hands, wondering whether or not to let him see me cry? Or (c) sit next to him on the bed and say, “Let’s get rid of this thing. What do you think about burning it?”

  Never mind which one is true. Tell me which one would have changed things. Tell me which one would have led us, inevitably, to an ending other than this one.

  Still not getting it right. Try this:

  The day they went away was like a death and a birth all at once. That doesn’t sound the way he means it to; he’s not breaking it down into anything as clear as sorrow or joy. He knows that birth and death are not the pure events people think them to be. He remembers when his youngest sister, Lena, was born, how angry she was to find herself in the world. And the lovely look on his grandfather’s face the morning that he finally didn’t wake up.

  I tried, but that’s not what you want to hear.

  There are no pictures of Milo smiling between 1992 and 1994.

  When he knocks over a basin of water, when he wakes yelling from a nightmare, he sees it in his mother’s face: she is the only one in all of Hamelin who has to face such trials.

  He has no doubt that they’d think of him fondly if he were gone. He’s seen it happen with the others. There’s never any talk of Erhard’s stubbornness or Hannelore’s temper fits. How Ingo was selfish and Ebba told tales. Here, they had been as much trouble as Theodor is. Gone, they’re good and sweet and … loved.

  While you’re going through it, you don’t know which things are going to be important. You don’t know what they’re going to remember. Which matters more: that I let him stay home from school because he’d been awake with nightmares, and we made pancakes and went to the movies? Or that I yelled at him in front of two of his friends because he spilled soda on some of my notes? That I spent more on his presents that first Christmas than I had on everybody combined the year before? Or that I asked him what the hell was wrong with him when he dumped all the dirt from a potted plant onto the floor?

  The adults simply mourn that the children are gone. Theodor burns to know what’s become of them. His parents say things that don’t make sense—they’re inside the mountain, the Piper took them to a wonderful place. For a while he believes it.

  He wonders what it’s like there. Do they get to hear that music all the time? Perhaps they’ve formed their own town, a whole new city of children. He imagines them serious: Elke sweeping the dust over a threshold, Rudi and Georg learning trades. They would all need to work together; they would all need to be useful. They would have new roles, becoming far more important than the children they’d been when they were here in Hamelin, putting dolls to bed and drawing in the mud with sticks.

  I pieced together a hasty religion, hoping it might bring him comfort. I spoke about heaven as if it were something I believed in. But he was always able to trip me up. He wouldn’t accept a heaven with no hell, a god without a devil. No matter how carefully I thought it through, I couldn’t come up with a story he’d believe.

  He would have gone with them if he could. The music … if the adults could have heard it, they’d understand. It was like nothing else in the world.

  In his dreams, the Piper comes back for him, just for him. “Come along,” he says. “We’ll go as slowly as you like.” Whatever happened to the other children—whether the inside of the mountain is beautiful or terrible, or something in between—he wants it to happen to him, too.

  The Piper leads him out of the city. The mountain cracks open. But he can never see inside.

  It was all clear to Milo. Everything had changed, and if the rest of us couldn’t see it, it was because of our own lack of vision. If the world could withstand a breach this great—if an organism as complex as a family could be cut in half and still asked to live—then what was the point in following any of the smaller rules?

  One of the many days when I was called in to school to pick him up early, I found him on a bench just inside the door, being held on a teacher’s lap. His arms were crossed in front of his chest, and she had her hands on his wrists. It looked like a hug, and I was glad to see that someone was providing comfort, consoling him, my poor desperate boy. Until I got closer and realized she was restraining him. She was holding him in place.

  He’s bent under the double shame: that he let them go, and that he didn’t go with them.

  His plate, full every day. His mother, bewildered to see him there.

  Looking at a dead bird in the street, he can’t find a way to see it as anything other than what it has become: an object, empty, still.

  Some days he knows they’re not in the mountain at all.

  I will never fully know what Milo lost. There were games he and Rosemary used to play together, games no one else knew the rules to. Jokes he and Mitch shared, conversations I wasn’t a part of.

  And now there are songs that no one would have otherwise heard. Books that no one would have read. It doesn’t make it worth it—of course not. Never. But it serves a purpose. You need a hard surface to rest your paper against. Without it, you end up writing on air.

  He remembers something from when he
was smaller. A neighbor of the family had become ill, and it seemed inevitable that he would die. The priest went to the man’s house to speak solemn words, to smear oil on his flesh. Then the family waited. But the man didn’t die; he got better. Only now that he’d been given the rites of the dead, he was no longer allowed to be a part of the living world. He couldn’t sit at meals with his family; he couldn’t eat or drink. He had to keep his feet bare. And Theodor heard his parents say that he and his wife could no longer share a bed.

  He didn’t live long, but for a time he was a curiosity in the town. The walking ghost. The not-quite-dead. Not so different from what Theodor is now.

  I remember once, driving down a busy street, I saw this brief tableau: A woman pushing a stroller on the sidewalk stopped abruptly, her body tense and frustrated. As people moved around her, she lifted the baby with one hand, pulled her shirt up roughly with the other, and put the child to her breast. I could see, written in her movements, Fine. You win. I’ll expose myself on the street if that’s what you want.

  It’s hard to get that balance right: the child’s needs and the mother’s, generosity and self-preservation. “Motherhood” is not a synonym for “sacrifice,” but neither is “sacrifice” a synonym for “submission.” It’s something that mother and child need to work out. It’s something that the two of you have to learn together.

  He can’t be all of them. He isn’t enough. Even before, when he only had to be himself—even then he wasn’t enough.

  But whether it has to do with strength or weakness or fate or dumb luck, he’s here, and he’s the only one left who can say it. He’s here.

  He’s here. He would have gone with them if he could, but that isn’t the way it ended. The day they went away was like a birth and a death all at once.

  There are some stories no one wants to hear.

  Chapter Sixteen

  After a couple of hours have passed, time enough for Milo to cool down and for me to shatter and rebuild everything I know about him, I go looking for him.

  I find him downstairs, watching a movie in a cozy, denlike room I haven’t been in yet. When he sees me in the doorway, he picks up a remote and pauses the action on the screen, leaving a frozen image of a kid swinging a baseball bat.

  “Hi,” I say.

  “Hi.”

  I venture farther into the room, sit down on the opposite end of the couch. Neither of us says anything for a minute.

  “You know,” I say softly, “the other day I heard the song ‘Traitor in the Backseat’ for the first time. I thought I knew all your music, but I’d never heard that one.” I reach out tentatively, put a hand on the back of his head. Ruffle his hair gently, like I used to do when he was little. “I loved it.”

  He doesn’t answer, just watches me. He looks wary.

  “I really liked the way you wrote about the sibling relationship. The sort of paradox that they annoy each other all the time, but they’re connected in a way that no one else quite gets.” I’m not sure I’ve ever talked to him this way about his work. Like I’m thinking about it and not just saying nice things because he’s my son. “And all those gorgeous details, about seeing the ocean on the other side of the guardrail and the kids making fun of someone they’d seen, the guy who had a funny-looking tan.” I smile a little bit, meeting his eyes. “Just really evocative. Made me cry, almost.”

  He nods. He looks down at his hands resting in his lap, but I can see he’s pleased. “Thank you,” he says.

  “I think that might be the only song I’ve heard where you were really clearly writing about Rosemary. Are there others?”

  He shrugs. “Not really. There’s a line about home movies in ‘Every Other Day’ where I was thinking about her.”

  “Right.” I nod and think for a minute before I quote the line: “‘Under the sprinkler, in an endless ring / Never get older, never miss a thing.’”

  Milo nods.

  “And I always thought that ‘Life as We Know It’ was about Daddy, at least partly. Am I right about that?”

  “Yeah. Not all of it, just that part about learning to drive. I remember when I was really little, like five or six, I used to think about how cool it would be when I was finally old enough to drive a car. And the way I always pictured it, I figured he’d be the one to teach me.”

  I smile. “He probably would have handled it better. I was not the world’s calmest driving instructor.”

  Milo smiles, too. “I was so mad that time you grabbed the wheel in the CVS parking lot. You almost swerved us into a light pole. I was not going to hit that old lady.”

  “Probably not. I might have been overreacting. I wasn’t used to judging distances from the passenger’s side instead of the driver’s side, you know? From where I was sitting, it looked like it was going to be close.” I think for a minute, not quite trusting my own memory. “Did you actually give her the finger? After the two of us practically ran her over?”

  He looks sheepish. “Yeah, that wasn’t my finest moment. I was mad at you, and kind of freaked out, because she was a little closer than I thought she was. But, you know. Not really her fault.”

  I smile. “No.” I look back at the TV screen, the boy’s blue cap, the blur of the bat in motion. “It’s really nice that you’ve honored them that way. Daddy and Rosemary. I think that if they could hear the songs, they’d like them.”

  He shrugs, deflecting the compliment. “Maybe. Aren’t you going to say that they probably can hear them somewhere?”

  I shake my head. “No. I’d like to believe that’s true, but I don’t really think it is.”

  “You’ve written about them, too,” he says. “I mean, obviously.”

  He looks tentative, nothing close to angry, but I answer carefully. “Yes,” I say. “All the time. Even when I don’t mean to.”

  He nods. “Even when you think you’re doing something else completely.”

  The upholstery of the couch is soft, something like suede but more durable. I run a finger over the cushion in a vague circular pattern.

  “Clearly ‘sorry’ isn’t the way to go here,” I say. “There are a lot of things that I wish I’d done differently, but I love you more than anything else in the world, and I really, really hope that I can get back into your life, in whatever way you’re comfortable with.”

  The words sound clumsy to me, and I regret the ‘anything else in the world’ part as soon as I say it, afraid he’ll take it to mean that if Mitch and Rosemary were still in the world, I might love them more. But when I look at him, he’s smiling faintly, looking both annoyed and amused.

  “Jeez, Mom,” he says. “I’m right here, sitting two feet away from you. In what way are you not back in my life?”

  For a moment I can’t say anything. I’m grateful and overwhelmed, because it’s so generous and so understated and just so very Milo. And he can see that I’m trying not to lose it, that I’m moved almost to tears by something he said to make me laugh, and he rolls his eyes in a way that I know is affectionate. And then I really am laughing along with him.

  “I kind of thought that was obvious,” he says drily. “I mean, yeah, it’s not like everything’s all rainbows and puppy dogs, but if I were going to kick you out, I’d have done it before now.”

  “Thank you,” I say, my voice still choked. I lean over and give him a kiss on the forehead.

  “For not kicking you out.” His tone is sardonic. “No problem. That would make a hell of a Mother’s Day card: ‘You raised me and nurtured me, and in return I won’t send you away to sleep on a pile of garbage in the alley.’”

  I laugh again and finally manage to pull myself together, wiping my eyes with a finger. I’m not sure I deserve it, and I’m not sure I won’t screw it up, but for the moment I feel lucky. Blessed.

  “Have you eaten?” Milo asks. “I’m starving all of a sudden.”

  He turns off the TV, the little boy on the screen still a moment away from hitting the ball or missing it, and together we walk to
the kitchen to find some dinner.

  • • •

  When Milo was a little boy, we once had a discussion about the difference between DNA and the soul. I’d inadvertently, at different times, defined each of them as “the thing that makes you you.” I don’t imagine that my answer was particularly enlightening; it can be both alarming and humbling to realize the scope of your child’s faith in your ability to explain the world to him. As out of touch as I was with the things I’d learned when I was young, I struggled with half-forgotten phrases about dust and breath, coils and nucleotides. I told him that it would all become clearer when he was older.

  But here on the other side of “when you’re older,” we sometimes draw the lines too clearly. If I were to ask Milo now, he’d probably say what I said then: that the soul and DNA are completely separate ideas, and that they have nothing to do with each other.

  Of the many gifts parents receive from their children, this is one of the best: the way they give us a new way of seeing, even after they’ve lost the thread of it themselves. Left to my own devices, I would never have dreamed up the idea of an album of songs that don’t exist. I wouldn’t have remembered that whatever we call it, there’s a part of us that’s essential, eternal, connecting us forward through generations and Elysium. Making us the people we are.

  • • •

  Milo and I talk over dinner and for a long time afterward, far-ranging conversations that move from trips Milo took with Bettina to the politics of the music industry to the temperament of the dog we used to have. We don’t talk about the details of the murder case or the books I’ve written or anything else that might possibly unbalance us. I don’t want to avoid the hard topics forever, but for tonight I’m giving us a break.