The Nobodies Album

by Carolyn Parkhurst

  I don’t answer. I’m thinking again of the mother duck, how it must have looked from her perspective. Fragile bodies hurtling toward the pavement.

  “God, I’m sorry,” she says after a brief silence. “That was so not the right thing to say.”

  “It’s okay,” I say. “No one knows what the etiquette is for this kind of situation.”

  I hear the sound of a cigarette lighter, and she pauses as she breathes in the smoke. “Last week I asked my mail carrier if she was pregnant.”

  I shake my head, slightly baffled. I assume she’s giving an example of another time when she said something that turned out to be inappropriate, but I don’t ask her why she’s telling me this, or whether it was embarrassing, or how much weight her mail carrier has gained. Instead I think about how to redirect the conversation. “You know, speaking of Roland,” I say finally, though it’s actually been several minutes since we have, “after I left yesterday, I saw him outside the building, trying to get into the funeral. The security people asked him to leave.”

  “Oh, well, I’m not surprised,” she says. “It’s too bad, though, because I think he really did love Bettina.”

  I think of the photograph sitting on the table downstairs, Roland pushing Bettina on a swing, and I feel … not frightened, exactly, but uneasy.

  Lisette continues talking. “He was definitely like a father to her,” she says. “Even if he turned out not to be her actual father.”

  I pause. Now I’m completely confused. “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, you don’t know the story?”

  “No. I don’t know anything.”

  “Well, for years Kathy thought that Roland was Bettina’s father. And Roland believed it, and he did his part—he gave them money, and he saw Bettina from time to time. And then, when Bettina was maybe eight or nine, they did a paternity test, and it turned out not to be him.”

  I try to absorb this. “Wow,” I say. “So …”

  There’s a knock on my door. “Mom? Are you in there?”

  “Hi,” I call. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

  “Okay,” he says. “I’ll be down in the kitchen.”

  “Is that Milo?” asks Lisette.

  “Yeah.”

  “You’ve got hot- and cold-running rock stars over there,” she says. “I’ll let you go.” I feel like I need to ask her more questions, but I’m not even sure what they’d be. “Good to talk to you. How long are you in town for?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Everything’s pretty much up in the air.”

  “Right. Well … call if you need a break.”

  A break from what, I’m not sure, though I suppose she means a break from my own project of trying to keep my son out of prison. “Okay,” I say. “Thanks. Take care.”

  After we hang up, I go downstairs. I stop to introduce myself to the housekeeper, who’s sweeping the entryway, and then I continue to the kitchen, where I find Milo, eating a bowl of cereal and looking at an open laptop.

  “Good morning,” I say. “Sorry for waking you earlier. I’m glad you were able to get back to sleep.”

  “That’s okay,” he says, looking up briefly. He points toward one of the counters. “There’s coffee, if you want some.”

  “Thanks.” I open cabinets until I find a mug. I realize I haven’t eaten breakfast, so when I open the refrigerator to get milk, I also take a carton of yogurt. It’s a brand I’ve never seen before, German or Austrian, with pictures of cherries on the foil lid.

  As I sit down at the table, Milo closes his computer, which I take as a gesture of politeness, though it could also be that he doesn’t want me to see what he was looking at.

  “So … welcome,” he says, looking at me as if he’s not quite sure what I’m doing here.

  I smile at his expression of vague disconcertedness, his tousled morning hair. “Thank you.” I peel the top from my yogurt. “How are you? Anything planned for the day?”

  “Yeah, my lawyer’s coming over to meet with me around eleven.”

  I nod. A house call from a lawyer on a Saturday morning. My son is an important man. “To go over anything in particular?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “I’m not sure.” He takes a bite of cereal. “Also, I guess the police are finished with my house, so I need to … deal with that in some way.”

  “Deal with it?”

  “You know, have it cleaned, decide whether I’m going to sell it or whatever. I don’t really see myself moving back there, whatever happens.”

  This, at least, is something I can help with. “Why don’t you let me take care of that?” I say. “I’ll deal with the cleaning, and I can … go through Bettina’s things, if you’d like. And if you decide to sell, I can handle all those details.”

  I try to read his look. Grateful, but wary, like he’s not sure he should let me do this.

  “Let me help,” I say. “I’ll be glad to have something concrete to work on.” A project. Like Kathy Moffett’s.

  He sighs, then laughs a little. “I feel like I’m fourteen years old. I’m trying to think if there’s anything I wouldn’t want you to see.”

  I know he’s talking about the standard kinds of items that might shock a mother or cause her to worry—drug paraphernalia or sex toys or something of that ilk. (Or, oddly, that’s what I hope he’s talking about. I’d hate to think there’s an I-hate-Octavia-Frost-themed room that Turf Wars didn’t visit, full of voodoo dolls and remaindered copies of Tropospheric Scatter.) But the statement raises darker images than I think he intended. There are things in that house that I don’t want him to see. Things I’m willing to see so he doesn’t have to.

  “You’ve got enough to worry about,” I say firmly. “I promise not to snoop. Much.” And then, because I’m not sure I’m allowed to make that kind of joke yet, I clarify: “I won’t open any drawers or closets. I’ll follow the no-search-warrant rule—I’m not allowed to look at anything that’s not in plain sight.”

  He smiles at my cautiousness. “Okay, thanks. You can get the keys from Sam Zalakis, when he comes. My lawyer.”

  “Good,” I say. I finish eating my yogurt, then pick up the carton and look around for the trash.

  Milo’s finished his cereal and is slumped in his chair, looking into the middle distance. He’s so subdued, his whole posture so forlorn. Which, of course, is normal under the circumstances, but I hate it.

  “Can I get you anything else to eat?” I ask him. It’s the universal script of mothers during times of powerlessness: offer food. He shakes his head.

  I stand behind him, reach down to put my arms around him. He lets me pull him into a hug, and he rests his head on my shoulder and sighs. I hold him, silent and still.

  In a strange way, when Milo was little, I almost liked it when he was sick. Not that I wanted him to feel bad, not that I didn’t hope he’d be better soon. But those were the times when my relationship to him was clearest, and least complicated. There’s some truth, I think, to the idea that parents clash most with the children who are most like themselves. Milo and I are impatient and willful, inventive and passionate and mercurial. We are sensitive to slights; we are quick to anger. And no matter how many books I write, no matter how many characters I knot and untangle, I’m not sure I’ll ever have a full understanding of either of us.

  He pulls back, and I kiss his forehead before I let him go. “I love you,” I say. “And whatever happens, I’ll help you get through this.”

  These are familiar words, ritual or cliché, whichever you prefer. But they’re like wedding vows or condolences for the grieving: they adopt new meaning each time they’re uttered.

  • • •

  After Milo goes upstairs to shower and dress, I pour myself another cup of coffee and set about looking for a company to clean the house referred to alternately in the news as “the scene of the murder” and “219 Sea Cliff.” I’d like to find a phone book, but I don’t know where to look; perhaps people don’t even use phone books anymore, thoug
h I know the phone companies still give them out. Milo’s taken his computer with him, which is probably just as well. I wouldn’t look through his files, but I know myself well enough to know that the temptation would be heavily present.

  I go upstairs to retrieve my laptop. As I come back down, I’m thinking about coincidence and synchronicity, the way it seems significant when you learn something you never knew before—the meaning of the word “ramellose,” or the fact that a group of owls is called a parliament—and then, seemingly all at once, you hear it mentioned in conversation, and you spot it in both a nineteenth-century novel and a newspaper article about local weekend getaways. Lisette Freyn and crime-scene cleanup—the world doubling back on itself, like fabric folded to reveal that two separate holes were made with a single rip. It seems like it should mean something, but it almost certainly doesn’t. We don’t keep track of the times in our lives when things don’t match up.

  There are a number of listings for companies that handle CTS in San Francisco. One of the interesting things about researching a subject for a novel is that the details you forget to learn are often the practical ones. I know what kind of cleaning solutions these businesses use, and how the workers protect themselves from contact with bodily fluids, but I have no idea what kind of prices to expect or whether anyone will be there on a Saturday to answer the phone.

  I’ve been planning to call two or three places, to compare estimates, but the first phone call turns out to be such an ordeal—I don’t know the square footage or the kind of surfaces that have been affected; I don’t know whether the blood is confined to a single room—that I just go ahead and make an appointment to meet someone at the house on Monday. If the woman I’m speaking to recognizes the address, if she’s exchanging high fives with her coworkers about landing the Milo Frost house, she doesn’t let me hear it in her tone.

  After I hang up, I find my airline reservation, and after a few minutes of investigating how much it would cost to change the return to later in the week, I simply cancel it. I’ve decided to make things easy for myself, where I can.

  Milo comes downstairs a few minutes before eleven, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, his hair falling in thick, wet stripes. As soon as he walks into the kitchen, I can see that his posture is different than it was earlier: his body is looser, less hunched.

  “I remembered something while I was in the shower,” he says. He sits down and looks at me intently. “About the phone call, the one at twelve-thirty. I remember talking to Bettina.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah. It’s still fuzzy, and I don’t remember all the details, but I remember that I’d been calling her all night, the whole time I was driving—God, it’s amazing I didn’t kill myself.” He shakes his head. “Anyway, she wouldn’t answer, and she wouldn’t answer, and then finally … I was outside, it was wherever I was when I hit my head. And I was freezing, and it was dark, and she finally picked up the phone.”

  “What do you remember about the conversation?”

  “Not much. Bits and pieces. But I think we made up. Or not made up, exactly—she was still pissed, and it wasn’t like the problems were just going to go away. But I’m absolutely certain that we ended on a kind of ‘let’s sleep on it before we make any decisions’ note.”

  I nod, not sure how much hope I can afford to spend on this. “So you think she had forgiven you? Or at least given you the idea that she might?”

  He shrugs. “Like I said, I don’t remember specifically. But I know I was incredibly happy when I put the phone back in my pocket. I know I felt like things might be okay.”

  “Well, that’s something, anyway.”

  “Yeah.” His eyes are intense. “It’s not like I can prove it. But I know now. I know I didn’t kill her.”

  I watch him. He’s relieved and … something close to grateful. Glad to have something to hold on to. I’m not sure that this proves as much as he thinks it does, or that Sam Zalakis will be able to turn it into an airtight defense, but I’m happy he feels he can put that worry to rest.

  “I never once thought you did,” I say.

  The doorbell rings, and I follow Milo into the front hall. As he opens the door, I’m wishing I’d asked him whether or not he’d like me to play any role in this meeting. Because I’m his mother and because I’m here, I feel like I should sit in on the discussion, in case he needs advice or help navigating the legal intricacies. But I suspect that’s no longer my job. I wasn’t there when he bought his house or negotiated his last two recording contracts or proposed marriage impulsively over dinner; I certainly wasn’t there when he stood and listened to murder charges being read to him by police officers. I’ll follow his lead on this.

  Sam Zalakis comes in, looking much as he did when I saw him on CNN. He’s dressed more casually, but he’s no less well groomed or expensively outfitted. He and Milo shake hands and exchange their greetings, and then Milo introduces me.

  “So nice to meet you,” he says warmly, taking my hand. “My daughter will be so excited to hear I met you. She’s at Stanford, and she wrote a paper about you in one of her classes. Or not you, I guess, but your books.”

  “Thank you,” I say, which isn’t entirely the right response but is at least in the ballpark. I’m evaluating him the same way I used to appraise Milo’s girlfriends when I met them: Who are you, and how are you going to treat my son?

  “Before I forget,” he says to Milo, setting his briefcase down on a chair and withdrawing a manila envelope, “here are your house keys and the garage door opener. The police are completely finished, so you can go back whenever you want.”

  Milo gestures to me. “You can give them to my mom,” he says. “She’s taking care of the cleaning and all that.”

  Sam hands me the envelope. “It’s good that you’re here to help him,” he says. “These are the times when family is most important.” We all nod solemnly, as the script seems to require.

  “How’s the case looking?” I ask. I know it’s not a question he can answer easily, but I imagine that reassuring the family is a part of his job. And I’d very much like to be reassured.

  He nods, as if I’ve asked something that can be answered with a yes or a no. “I’m hopeful,” he says. “There are some details that aren’t adding up, and the police know it, and the prosecutor knows it. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us, but this is not an open-and-shut case by any means.”

  I smile at him, hoping it conveys my gratitude, because I don’t quite trust my voice. “Hopeful” is a better word than I could have expected.

  Sam turns to Milo. “Where shall we set up? And are you going to join us, Ms. Frost?”

  I give Milo a questioning look. “No, that’s all right,” he says. “I mean, you can if you want to, but I don’t think it’s necessary.” And then to Sam, “We can talk upstairs in the library.”

  “Okay, then,” I say, as they turn and start up the stairs. I stand in the empty entryway for a moment, unsure what I should do next. I haven’t seen the whole house yet, and I’m curious to look around, though I don’t want to overstep my bounds.

  Idly I walk into the sitting room opposite the front hall, a large, bright space with a window that looks out onto the pool. The black-and-white floor continues in here, though most of it is covered with a plush rug in sunny, saturated shades of red, yellow, and orange.

  There are bookshelves built into one of the walls, and I gravitate toward them, as I always do. I didn’t have a chance the other day to look at the books in the library, but I imagine that some thought—on the part of someone, Roland or the decorator—went into deciding which books would be displayed in this more public space. These are the books you see if you know Roland Nysmith only slightly, if you’re invited in only so far. Dozens of big, glossy doorstops filled with photographs; several shelves about the history of rock music; books about Zen Buddhism and the environment and restoring antique cars. All of it punctuated with awards statues and plaques commemorating high numbers of re
cords sold. Here’s an actual Grammy; I can’t resist reaching out to touch it.

  I see four separate books about Roland himself, and I pull out one with the title Man Under Water, only to put it back almost immediately. There’s something unseemly about flipping through a biography of a man who might walk in at any moment.

  There’s a doorway back by the window, and I wander through to the next room, which is the dining room. There’s a mammoth table and chairs—dark wood, all very clean lines. Everything’s so immaculate, and I wonder if Roland actually uses any of these spaces on a regular basis. I’m headed toward the door on the other side of the room, which I can see leads back to the kitchen, when something catches my eye. There, in a glass-fronted china cabinet against the wall, is a collection of dishes with a pattern of yellow roses and vines.

  It’s the same kind of china my mother had. The same as the sugar bowl.

  I feel suddenly afraid, though I’m not sure why. It’s not a particularly rare design. I looked it up once a few years ago, thinking I might replace some pieces, and it appears to have been a popular pattern in the late forties and early fifties; it was manufactured in England but also sold widely in the United States. My parents were married in 1952. I don’t know when Roland’s parents were married, but it stands to reason that it might have been somewhere in the early part of that time period.

  I’m leaning in, still looking at the dishes, when I hear Roland’s voice behind me. “Hello there,” he says.

  For reasons that have never been clear to me—poor reflexes?—I tend to have a slightly delayed startle reaction, and it’s only as I turn and see him standing in the kitchen doorway that I flinch and make a small, surprised noise.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, looking concerned and faintly amused. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “That’s okay,” I say. “It was just so quiet.” My heart’s beating fast, and I feel as if I’ve been caught doing something I shouldn’t. But they’re just dishes.

  “I was looking at your china,” I say. “This is the same pattern my parents had when I was growing up. I have a whole cupboard full of it at home.”