The Nobodies Album

by Carolyn Parkhurst

  “I didn’t expect to see you here,” she says after she lets go. “Though of course I’ve been thinking about you. I got your e-mail that you were in town.”

  The pictures lock into their proper slots. “Lisette,” I say. “Lisette Freyn.”

  “Bingo,” she says, taking out another cigarette.

  • • •

  There’s an analogy I came up with once for an interviewer who asked me how much of my material was autobiographical. I said that the life experience of a fiction writer is like butter in cookie dough: it’s a crucial part of flavor and texture—you certainly couldn’t leave it out—but if you’ve done it right, it can’t be discerned as a separate element. There shouldn’t be a place that anyone can point to and say, There—she’s talking about her miscarriage, or Look—he wrote that because his wife had an affair.

  So Lisette Freyn—the living, breathing girl who dropped out of school to follow a rock band from city to city, the embodiment of all of our mothers’ worst nightmares, rediscovered years later as a casual online friend—has never found her way into my books. Just as it’s true (do I even need to say it?) that none of the fictional husbands I’ve written are Mitch, not exactly, and none of the children—loved and mourned and resented and worried over—are Rosemary or Milo. And none of the protagonists are me, except in the sense that of course they all are.

  But the teenage girl in The Human Slice owes some of her fragile self-assurance to Lisette (or at least to my fragmented memories of her), and if Lisette were to peer into the surface of my books, looking for her own reflection, she’d find a handful of minor characters who share one or more of her traits: a gesture, a verbal pattern, a little piece of life experience. The story of Lisette Freyn has become part of my own inner mythology, a drop in the reservoir of history, memory, and invention that I dip into when my pen begins to run dry, until I almost forgot there was a real person at the center of it. But here she is, standing in front of me.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask abruptly. “I mean, here …” I gesture toward the rounded building, the crowd of watchers. “Did you know … do you know the family?”

  She nods, blows smoke through her lips. “Her mother’s an old friend of mine, from way back. Bettina was a beautiful girl.” She shakes her head. “It’s a terrible, terrible thing.”

  “I agree,” I say firmly. “It’s awful.”

  “I’ve never met Milo,” Lisette says, looking at me intently. “But I’m just about the only person in Kathy’s life who’s sticking up for him at this point. I keep telling her, there’s more to this story, and we can’t just make assumptions when we don’t have all the facts.”

  I nod. “Thank you,” I say.

  She crushes out her cigarette. “Well, I should get back in there. The service will be starting soon.” She looks at me curiously. “What are you doing here?” She points toward the Columbarium, as I did a minute ago. “I mean, here.”

  I pause. “I don’t know,” I say. “I knew that it was happening today, and I just wanted to come. I don’t know why, I thought …” I trail off. Honestly, I don’t know what I thought. “I didn’t realize I wouldn’t be able to go inside, though.”

  “Oh, you want to go in?” she asks. “I can get you in.” She smiles conspiratorially. She seems excited, as if we’re kids who are about to get away with something.

  “Really?” I say. “Are you sure?”

  “Sure. But keep your glasses on, and try to stay away from Kathy. She’d probably freak out if she saw you. And she can be a little … dramatic.”

  That almost stops me. This isn’t a game; there’s a woman in there who has lost her child. I think of the memorial service we had for Mitch and Rosemary: a double funeral, rarer even than a double wedding. It was wrenching but also, strangely, the best day of the ghastly year that followed their deaths. It was a day when I was not expected to be strong for my son or to put the tragedy behind me and move forward to whatever might come next. There was no embarrassment in crying, no awkwardness in talking about the two of them as much as I wanted to. And I wasn’t alone, left by myself with a child I could hardly look at.

  Paradoxically, that’s the thing—the memory of Milo, nine years old and so lost, my shame over being the kind of mother I was in those years—that makes me follow Lisette as she turns and starts walking through the crowd. I follow her up the marble steps, right up to the man with the clipboard.

  “Hi again,” she says to him with a wide smile, holding up her pack of cigarettes. “I’ll probably be in and out a million more times. It’s an addiction.” And then, casually, as an afterthought, she puts her hand out toward me, as though she’s going to introduce us. “She’s with me, by the way,” she says. “She’s a dear friend.” And then she takes my arm and sweeps us inside before he can even answer.

  • • •

  The building is beautiful inside, everything marble and mosaic and gold leaf. There’s a central rotunda, three stories high and topped with a stained glass dome, surrounded by a circular path that edges the circumference of the building. I keep my head down as I walk through groups of funeral-goers, talking quietly to each other and pausing to examine the compartments lining every wall: little brass doors up to the ceiling.

  “So,” I say softly to Lisette as we walk around the bending pathway. “A columbarium is a place where people store ashes?” I’m trying to remember my Latin. The root derives, I believe, from the word for “dove,” and I imagine each of those alcoves on the wall as a home for a bird, cooing and rustling and laying eggs, instead of a place that holds piles of ashes, the barest remains of human lives.

  “Right,” she says. “There are no cemeteries in San Francisco—did you know that?”

  “I did,” I say. “I was just reading about it this morning.” And I was, in my search for gravestones-that-aren’t-gravestones, trying to figure out where Milo might have gone on the night of the murder. But it’s also one of those things I might have filed away once in my mind: a corner of society so desperate for space that the dead are unearthed to make room for the living. A city that holds no ghosts; a metropolis reserved for the breathing. Present company excepted. “What happens to people who don’t want to be cremated?”

  “They get buried in Colma, a little ways south of here. It’s all cemeteries there, cemeteries and car dealerships.”

  “How far away is that?”

  She shrugs. “Maybe twenty, twenty-five minutes down 101.” Unlikely, I think, that Milo would have driven that far in the condition he was in. I make a mental note to add this information to my hotel-letterhead timeline.

  We walk slowly, looking at the vaults and niches on the walls. There are plaques with names and dates, as in any repository for the dead, but there are also glass-fronted cabinets where people have arranged mementos that remind them of their loved ones. I see a toy car, a picture of a man with a dog, a full bottle of brandy. Handwritten letters, silk flower leis, a thermos from a Batman lunch box.

  “It’s a beautiful building,” I say.

  “Yeah,” says Lisette. “Actually, this is where I vote. They put the machines right there.” She gestures toward the central rotunda, currently filled with folding chairs and a couple of tables set up with food and drinks. And then, vaguely, she continues: “Harvey Milk is in here somewhere.” Certain things are coming back to me about Lisette. I remember that she speaks in non sequiturs and then acts surprised that you haven’t been inside her mind to follow the same path.

  “Not a huge turnout,” I say, looking around.

  Lisette shakes her head. “The capacity’s pretty small. I don’t think you’re allowed to have more than fifty or sixty people. And Kathy wanted to keep it exclusive. She’s been negotiating selling the photo rights to a couple of different magazines. I think Us Weekly is ahead in the bidding.” I stare at her, and she shrugs. “It’s for charity,” she says. “She just didn’t want it to be a total circus.”

  Lisette excuses herself to say he
llo to somebody. I’ve been deliberately keeping my back to the center of the room; I haven’t spotted Kathy Moffett yet, and I want to keep a low profile. But when Lisette walks away, I turn and scan the room. Even though the crowd that’s gathered here isn’t large, it’s decidedly glamorous. One thing that always strikes me as false in funeral scenes in films and TV shows is that everyone’s always dressed entirely in black: no dark blue suits, no splashes of color, no print blouses because that’s what you had in your closet and you didn’t have time to go out and buy something new. But that’s the way it is here. These people might have been outfitted by a costume designer.

  There’s a stack of programs on a low table nearby, and I pick one up. The paper is thick and heavy. On the front there’s a picture of Bettina, standing in the sun, smiling, and the words “A Celebration of the Life of Bettina Amber Moffett, December 24, 1984–November 9, 2010.”

  Lisette returns and puts her hand lightly on my arm. “People are starting to sit down.”

  We walk toward the rows of folding chairs, and finally I catch a glimpse of Kathy Moffett, standing in the center of a tight knot of people. I feel somewhat relieved when I see how occupied she is. She’ll always be in a group today. I should have no trouble staying out of her way.

  Lisette and I take seats in a row toward the back. I open my program and pretend to read it while I look at Kathy. She’s a tall, slim woman with blond hair down to her shoulders. She has the kind of face—strangely thin nose, overly round cheeks—that I associate with plastic surgery. And I was wrong, not everyone here has followed the dress code so scrupulously. Bettina’s mother is dressed entirely in white.

  There’s a harp set up on one side of the rotunda, and a woman sits down on a low stool and begins to play. It takes me a minute to recognize the song; it’s “Someday We’ll Be Together,” by the Supremes.

  When the song ends, a man in a suit steps up to the podium at the front of the bank of chairs. He’s younger than I am—in his forties, maybe—and he has red hair and very pale skin. He clears his throat and waits while everyone settles down.

  “Good afternoon,” he says. “My name is Tom McGinn, and I’m a pastor at St. Jerome’s. On behalf of her mother, Kathy, I welcome all of you to this gathering in remembrance of Bettina Moffett. I’ve had some time over the past few days to talk to some of the people who loved Bettina, and I hope I’ll be able to do justice to the memory of her short but charmed life.

  “Bettina was born here in San Francisco on Christmas Eve, 1984, to a nineteen-year-old girl named Kathy Moffett. I didn’t know Kathy then, but it sounds like she was a remarkable young woman. She told me that even though she was young and unmarried, she made a promise to her daughter the night she was born: My darling girl, she said, I will do everything in my power to take care of you and to give you a good life.

  “Bettina was a beautiful child, bright and happy and lovable. She showed early talent in dance and in art, she always did well in school, and she was a joy to everyone who knew her.”

  I let my eyes drift to a table set up next to the podium, scattered with framed photos of Bettina. Some of them are too small to see from here, but there are several I can make out. There she is, a baby in a high chair with frosting on her face, and then she’s eight or nine, wearing a green bathing suit and sticking her tongue out at the camera. There’s one of a toddler Bettina, two or three years old, sitting on her mother’s lap; they’re both wearing black leather jackets, and Bettina’s wispy blond hair has been gelled into points. (Halloween? I wonder. Or just a glimpse of a younger, hipper kind of parenting than I’m used to?) I look at the girl in the pictures and try to figure out what I feel about her.

  “By the time Bettina was a teenager,” the man is saying, “she had grown into a beauty, and she did some modeling work, though Kathy was careful to make sure that it didn’t interfere with her having a normal teenage life. Bettina and her mother had an extraordinarily close bond—many people said that they were more like sisters than mother and daughter.”

  On one end of the picture table there’s a vessel of hand-blown glass in swirls of red and purple and blue and gold. It looks like a vase, or an oversized perfume bottle, and I realize with a bit of a jolt that it’s the urn. This girl, this woman, whose life is being summarized so neatly for us, the one my son lived with and loved and believes he might have killed—she’s there, in that bottle. That’s all that’s left. I look at the round stopper stuck in the urn’s fluted mouth, and I imagine that it’s holding in something more vital than dust and rough fragments of bone. Some spirit, some misty essence that might fly out if I were to step up there and simply remove the lid. I look at the girl in the green bathing suit, and I think about genies and wishes.

  “Bettina went on to college, and she graduated with flying colors. She was a smart young woman, and her options were limitless. Family members speculated that she might go on to law school or medical school. But like so many before her—her own mother among them—she fell in love with the music scene, and she never looked back.”

  It’s all so pat, as if she sat at her desk looking at brochures for “cardiologist” and “rock star’s girlfriend,” making lists of the pros and cons. I wonder what kind of absurd simplifications will be made someday to my own life story. And then I wonder, idly, whether I’m famous enough for the New York Times to have a prewritten obituary on file.

  “And so,” Pastor Tom McGinn is concluding, “we can all take comfort in the fact that though Bettina’s life was cut tragically short, it was indeed a life well lived. And now Bettina’s mother, Kathy, is going to say a few words.”

  As Kathy rises from the first row and walks toward the podium, I look down at the program on my lap so that a hank of hair falls over my face.

  “Thank you all for coming,” she says. “This has been, obviously, an extremely difficult time for me, and I’m so grateful for everyone’s kindness and support.”

  There’s a pause. “Bettina was my life,” she says abruptly. “I always tried, above all things, to teach her that she was precious, that she had value in this world. I believed that self-worth would be enough to ensure that she would stand up for herself, that she would never let anybody hurt her. And to learn that this beautiful, vibrant woman, my baby girl, was a victim of domestic violence, and had been for possibly years before her death, has been utterly heartbreaking to me.”

  A note of anger begins to hum in my chest. I glance up at Kathy, still angling my face down. She looks fervent, purposeful: a crusader. I see for the first time that she has a button pinned to her white silk lapel, a badge with a picture of Bettina’s face.

  “Every year,” she says, “two to four million women are assaulted by a domestic partner. Studies show that fully half of all women who are murdered are murdered by a husband or boyfriend.”

  I lean close to Lisette’s ear. “She certainly has her statistics down.”

  I’ve forgotten for a moment that they’re friends, but Lisette doesn’t seem offended. “She does a lot of charity work,” she whispers back. “She has this cat that only has one eye.”

  “The last time I saw my darling girl,” says Kathy, “was about an hour before she died. The last night of her life was a turbulent one. She called me early in the evening, more excited than I’ve ever heard her. She was with the man who would later kill her, whose name I will not speak aloud, for fear of polluting my daughter’s final resting place. But she was with that man, a man I had welcomed into my home, a man I did not yet know was capable of violence or brutality, and he had just proposed to her. She called me to say they had decided to get married.”

  There’s a little bit of a rustle among the guests. This is not a detail that the police have made public. No one’s rude enough to whisper, but everyone sits up a little straighter.

  “Less than an hour later,” Kathy says, “she called me back, in tears. She had caught this man, whom she had trusted and loved, in a lie. A lie of such huge magnitude that she could no
longer imagine spending her life with him. I wish I had told her then to get away from him and stay away. I wish I had told her to come to my house—” Her voice breaks.

  There’s a pause, a single muffled sob. Kathy clears her throat. “But I still didn’t understand what this man was capable of, and Bettina wanted a clean break. She asked me to come over and help her pack her things.”

  I clasp my hands together in my lap, tightly, and watch as the knuckles turn pink. I’m furious, but I don’t know if I have any right to be. If this were my daughter, instead of my son … I don’t know.

  “And so I went over, and I did my motherly thing. I supported her and hugged her and let her talk and cry. When she’d calmed down, she told me she was going to go to sleep and finish packing in the morning. I felt uneasy about her spending another night there, though I couldn’t have said why. But I knew that my daughter was a grown woman and that it was not my role to tell her what to do. So instead I gave her a hug and told her she could call me anytime. It was the last moment I ever spent with her. I remember reaching over to brush the hair away from her face, just like I did when she was little. Good night, my love, I said. Things will look better in the morning. And she smiled and said, I love you, Mom. And then I walked down the stairs and out of that house, which is something I’ll never be able to forgive myself for.”

  She hasn’t mentioned Milo coming home drunk. She hasn’t mentioned him yelling as she stood in the doorway or smashing the planter on the concrete.

  “I have been to hell this week,” she says. “And that’s nothing compared to the pain and terror Bettina must have felt in those last moments. Her death was vicious, and it was senseless. But I’ve decided that maybe I can use this tragedy to make sure that some other mother and some other daughter don’t have to go through this kind of hurt. I have a legal battle ahead of me—seeing this man behind bars for the rest of his life is my first priority—but when that’s done, I’m starting a foundation that will help young women get out of abusive environments before it’s too late. And I’m going to call it Bettina’s House.”