The Nobodies Album
Page 30
I won’t say how the novel ends, but it begins like this:
People in the town had been speculating for years about what Mrs. Winchester might keep inside her safe: jewels, piles of money, dishes dipped in gold. The day she died, the day that the workers put down their tools, never to complete whatever tasks they were in the middle of, her neighbors were disappointed to learn there was nothing of value inside. Some items of clothing. Clippings from newspapers. And a velvet box holding a lock of a baby’s hair.
These three years are difficult ones for Milo and Joe, who are grieving for interconnected but sometimes conflicting losses. Milo, always wondering if he’ll ever remember the one moment that still eludes him—the trip upstairs in the dark to whisper good night to the woman he thought was asleep, to kiss her forehead and leave a plastic bauble by her bed—isn’t sure he’ll ever forgive Joe for loving Bettina’s murderer. And Joe, perhaps understandably, sometimes wishes it were Milo behind bars instead.
There are times when it seems impossible that any semblance of friendship will remain between them, so it’s perhaps lucky in an unhappy way that they have Lia to bind them together. Lia, heartbroken and afraid; Lia, who will have nightmares for more than a year and who will spend Christmas Eve in a prison visiting room. Lia, the ligament that stretches between them, keeping them from snapping apart completely.
• • •
But three years is a long time, and by the time the verdict is read at Chloe’s trial, some good will have come from the bad. Pareidolia will record a new album, one I think is their best yet, though I may not be an impartial judge. Lia, who already has an impressive collection of loving grandmothers—in addition to Joe’s mother, Chloe has both a mom and a stepmother whom we all do our best to get along with—will nevertheless come to call me Nana. And at the party celebrating Milo’s exoneration, Roland and I will find ourselves alone for a moment in the kitchen. It’s there that I’ll look at him and wonder what, exactly, we’ve become to each other. It won’t be anything like the way it was with Mitch; there’s none of the twinning intimacy of lovers who do their growing up together. We’re two people who met already knowing who we were, and that makes it completely new. There in the kitchen, I’ll lean forward to kiss him, and wait to see what happens next.
• • •
Back to this night in November of 2010, not yet a week after Bettina’s death, this moment I’ve decided to linger on: After Joe stops talking and a terrible look of understanding crosses his face, Milo will call Sam Zalakis, who will come over, even though it’s late. The five of us—me, Milo, Sam, Roland, and Joe—will be up for most of the night, beginning the job of piecing together our version of the way things might have gone.
It’s not a harmonious process. It’s particularly difficult for Joe, who spends the first half of the night slumped in his chair, looking dazed and ill. After he’s had some time to regain his balance, he joins the conversation with a frantic passion: he argues, he reverses himself, and he rages at the rest of us for believing something he doesn’t yet want to believe. But he stays. And we do our best to take care of him.
Sometime around two a.m. Roland will make tea, and it will finally occur to me to go upstairs and retrieve the sugar bowl that Joe gave me, which we now conclude Chloe took from Roland’s china cabinet after the murder, when she suspected I might come to town. We’ll all watch as Milo takes the note from my hands and looks at it as if it’s something precious. Runs his fingers over the words, as if he’s reading Braille. When he speaks, his voice will be thick and hoarse. “Where did you get this?” he’ll ask. “That’s Bettina’s handwriting.”
Whatever I thought might be important about the note isn’t, or, at least, not that we know of. We’ll never learn when Bettina wrote those words, or what she was referring to, or who she thought was lying. But it’s this clue that’s not a clue, this piece of paper that turns out to have nothing to do with the murder itself, that determines how we’re going to tell Bettina’s story. It’s the starting point for the conversation in which Milo and Roland put Bettina together out of the pieces they have.
Roland will remember a little girl, funny but lonely, who used to leave notes for him to find. Sometimes jokes, sometimes poems. Sometimes things she didn’t want to say out loud. He’ll remember houses she built out of sticks and grass for fairies to live in, and he’ll remember the sad way she waved at him as her mother pulled her away from the courthouse after the judge ordered the paternity test. He’ll remember the two of them playing charades and twenty questions and games of Bettina’s own invention, and he’ll remember that whenever the rules called for players to draw slips of paper, the sugar bowl was pressed into service.
Milo will remember a New Year’s Eve party where he met a pretty girl and midnight seemed to hold more promise than it ever had before. He’ll remember that “family” was an idea neither of them trusted, but that eventually they gave each other a home. He’ll hold on to the hard-won memory that the last words they said to each other were kind ones.
Together they’ll remember that Bettina never lied, and that she didn’t like it when other people did. They’ll remember that “Someone is lying” is a phrase Kathy used when she didn’t want to hear what Bettina had to say.
It’s because of the note in the sugar bowl that I’ll finally start to feel like I know Bettina. It’s how I’ll learn that I would have liked her a great deal.
• • •
Back again to this moment in the living room, sitting with Roland and Joe. For now, we don’t know how any of this will end. But Joe says something, and Milo and I turn to look at each other. For the first time, it seems possible that the story might take a different turn.
Acknowledgments
First thanks, as always, go to my extraordinary agent, Douglas Stewart, for his continuing enthusiasm, unwavering support, and flawless judgment. I am also very much indebted to William Thomas at Doubleday, for his willingness to believe that I knew what I was doing, and to my brilliant and insightful editor, Alison Callahan, whose excellent instincts, creativity, and flexibility have made this a better book than it would have been without her.
Many, many thanks to Liz Duvall, Seth Fishman, Coralie Hunter, Judy Jacoby, Marcy Posner, Nora Reichard, Alison Rich, Shari Smiley, and Adrienne Sparks, for their remarkable behind-the-scenes work.
I am grateful to several wonderful friends and colleagues, including Jennifer Allison, Susan Coll, Katharine Davis, E. J. Levy, Ann McLaughlin, Leslie Pietrzyk, Dana Scarton, Amy Stolls, Paula Whyman, and Mary Kay Zuravleff, for their early reading, suggestions, and support.
Thank you to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, where I spent a wonderful and extremely productive two weeks; D. P. Lyle, for his consultation about forensics; and Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, which alerted me to some fascinating information about the Pied Piper of Hamelin at exactly the right moment.
Warm thanks to my family, including Doreen C. Parkhurst, M.D., William Parkhurst, Claire T. Carney, Molly Katz, David and Lynette Rosser, and Matthew and Margaret Rosser.
And finally, as always, endless love and gratitude to Evan, Henry, and Ellie, my three sunshines.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Carolyn Parkhurst
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.doubleday.com
DOUBLEDAY and the DD colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Parkhurst, Carolyn
The nobodies album: a novel/by Carolyn Parkhurst.—1st ed.
p. cm.
&nbs
p; 1. Women novelists—Fiction. 2. Mothers and sons—Fiction.
3. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3616.A754N63 2010
813′.6—dc22
2009041886
eISBN: 978-0-385-53321-8
v3.0