The Nobodies Album (20 page)

Chapter Ten

The cab pulls up in front of Roland’s house, and I pay the driver. I step out into the shallow bath of artificial light produced by the photographic equipment of those hardy souls who are still camped out here, hoping to get a shot of something valuable.

“Good evening,” I say to the assembled group as they document my walk toward the gate, my pressing of the intercom button. I get a few replies, and some shouted questions—
How’s Milo doing? Has he said anything to you about the night of the murder?
—but I sense a new listlessness in the effort. I haven’t turned out to be very important after all.

A voice I don’t recognize—a woman, possibly a housekeeper?—speaks to me through the intercom, and I identify myself and am granted admittance. As I pass through the gates, I’m thinking about
The Wizard of Oz
, the scene where they enter the Emerald City. I should choose my spectacles now, decide how I want to color whatever lies inside.

I walk up the steps and ring the bell. After a moment I hear some unexpected scrambling—quick footsteps, a raised voice—and the door opens, but just barely, no more than an inch or two. Then a man’s voice (“Let me get that”), and it swings open the rest of the way to reveal Joe, with Lia in his arms. He steps back, both to let me step in and, I think, to remove Lia from the doorway, from the sight line of the group gathered below.

“Hi there,” I say to Lia as Joe closes the door and sets her down.

“You’re here,” she says in her clear little voice, the ends of the words not quite closing into
r
’s. She looks me over and puts her hands on her hips. “I thought I told you to wear purple,” she says.

I look down at my dark skirt and blouse, my drab funeral clothes, smiling at the mimicked sternness in her tone. “Sorry,” I say. “Maybe next time. You’re not wearing purple either.” She’s wearing a loose red dress in some kind of jersey material.

“No,” she says. “I’m wearing my twirly-whirly dress.” And she spins to show me how the skirt billows.

“I have something for you,” I say. I open my purse and pull out the white bag containing the item I bought this morning at the hotel gift shop. It’s not much, but it was the only child-friendly thing I could find without resorting to candy. I hand her the bag, and she peers inside, then pulls out a small stuffed bear wearing a T-shirt that says “San Francisco.”

“Oh,” she says happily, “it’s my new teddy bear.” She rubs its soft nose across her cheek. “I’ve been waiting for this all day.”

I burst into laughter and look at Joe, who smiles and shakes his head with that look of resigned affection that parents have:
I don’t know where she gets this stuff
. “And what do you say, Lia?” he asks. But she’s already running back toward the kitchen. “Thank you,” she calls, without turning.

“How are you, Mrs. Frost?” Joe asks, ushering me in.

“Okay,” I say. “Do you think you might be able to start calling me Octavia?”

“I doubt it,” he says.

I follow him into the kitchen, and there they all are, sitting around the table: Milo, Chloe, and Roland. Lia has climbed into Chloe’s lap, and Chloe holds on to her with one hand while she leans over to pour wine into Milo’s glass. They’re eating Indian food, fragrant and colorful, and there’s an extra plate and utensils on the counter, next to a line of Styrofoam containers.

Still a miracle to walk into a room and see Milo there. He looks tired and unhappy, and I have an impulse to go over and kiss his tangled hair, but I’m not sure if that would be okay. Chloe and Roland smile and greet me, Roland standing and gesturing for me to help myself to some food. Milo smiles, too, and adds his voice to theirs, but he’s still looking down at his plate, and I don’t know whether that means anything or not. I have a seasick feeling, unsteady, like a dream. Here, in front of me, everything I wanted without daring to say so: my son sitting at the dinner table, waiting for me; a roomful of people who might yet become friends; a radiant child my heart can lay claim to. But the picture’s a little off-center, like a filmstrip with a cog out of gear. I don’t know how much of it I can trust.

I walk to the counter where the food is. The kitchen is a huge room, beautiful and well appointed but slightly bland. I suspect it was designed to appeal not to Roland in particular but to a generalized profile of the type of person rich enough to buy the house. I pick up a plate, spoon rice, chickpeas, chicken in a coral-colored sauce. Then I carry it to the table and sit down in an empty chair between Milo and Roland.

I touch my hand briefly to Milo’s shoulder. “How are you?” I say.

He shrugs, finally turning to look at me. I look at his dark eyes, his long lashes. Strangers used to stop me—at the park, in the supermarket—to comment on how beautiful his eyes were. “Okay,” he says. “I didn’t even leave the house today.”

“That’s not good. You should try to get outside.” Such a motherly thing to say. I feel like I’m reading from a script.

“It’s not worth it,” he says. He raises a hand and moves it through the air from left to right to indicate, I gather, reading something. “‘Less than a week after the murder of his girlfriend,’” he says, “‘Milo Frost was seen buying a pack of Life Savers.’”

Joe smiles grimly. “‘Early reports indicate they were Wint-O-Green.’”

Milo continues, “‘A source close to the suspected murderer reports that he plans to eat them in a dark room, to see if they really do create sparks when you crunch them.’”

They’re laughing now, and Milo’s finally looking a little more relaxed. They’ve always had this, this easy back-and-forth quality to their friendship, and I hadn’t even realized I’d been missing it. As I look at them, I’m thinking about the way the house used to come to life when the two of them walked in the door, the sound of them dropping backpacks and ransacking cupboards for a snack, debating different interpretations of sentences girls had uttered in their presence during the course of the day, and I feel a sort of homesickness that doesn’t have anything to do with place.

“I need to pee,” Lia says, wriggling off Chloe’s lap and whirling toward the kitchen door.

“You know where it is,” Chloe calls after her. “Call me if you need help.”

“So maybe you can see,” Milo says, turning back to me, “that I’m going a little stir-crazy.”

“Nice to have some company,” Roland says, “instead of just me and Milo rattling round the house by ourselves.”

Chloe exhales a brief laugh. “The fan fiction practically writes itself,” she says.

“Oh, Christ,” says Roland.

Joe looks amused. “‘I’ve heard stories about prison,’ Roland said, striding across the room and putting a hand on the younger man’s shoulder …”

They all laugh, and Milo looks at me as if he’s trying to decide whether to translate, like I’m an elderly grandmother in a babushka who speaks a little English but misses most of the subtler notes of conversation. I save him the trouble, look down at my plate, and take a bite of spinach.

I know what they’re talking about, in any case. There’s not much about Milo online that I haven’t seen, and it was a matter of some interest to me to learn that there were people who spent their time turning my son into a fictional character. I don’t read many of the stories—they’re mostly about sex (most often with Joe, which I wondered about until I learned it’s a common quirk of the genre), and like any mother, I protect myself from images I don’t want in my head. But with some careful screening—the authors assign them ratings, like movies—I’ve been able to find a few of the less racy ones, and I’m rather embarrassed to say I’ve bookmarked them all. I’m fascinated by the glimpses they afford, glimpses as hypothetical as my own, though it’s nice that someone else has done the work of imagining it for me. Milo walking into a recording studio. Milo bored on a tour bus. Milo having lunch at a restaurant with friends.

These writers are girls, mostly, and young women, and they want to strip Milo down in every possible way. They imagine a scene and write it a hundred different ways. They can’t stop trying to think how it might happen. For all their graphic bravado, they’re no more than a roomful of girls pressing Barbie dolls together for the thrill of doing something dirty. I suppose we wanted our daughters to be freer about sex, women of my generation. Now this is what they do instead of scratching “Mrs. Milo Frost” into their school desks.

I understand something about the obsession that motivates these girls, the longing to bridge the distance: Look, here he is, right in front of you. Get as close as you want. I’ve spent some time lurking in the chat rooms, watching the process by which these fans create their own versions of Milo. They start from the barest of materials—song lyrics, quotes from interviews—and build him up out of nothing. His elasticity as a subject is apparently limitless. Sometimes people request scenarios: Milo as a werewolf, Milo in an alternate universe in which men can become pregnant. It’s a commissioning of art, a new Renaissance—payment in enthusiastic comments, marked with winks—and in fanciful moments, I imagine what these writers would make of my requests. Milo goes back to college and graduates this time. Milo calls his mother on her birthday. Milo in an alternate universe where he passes over
Tropospheric Scatter
and picks up
The Human Slice
instead.

“I’ll tell you,” Roland is saying to Milo, “I miss the days when girls wanted to fuck me instead of wanting me to fuck you.” He laughs, and then his eyes settle on me. “Oh, well, strange days,” he says, buttoning the conversation closed, remembering that this isn’t the way you talk around people’s mothers, even if they are several years younger than you are.

Lia comes running back into the kitchen. I wonder if she ever walks.

“Can you eat a little bit more?” Chloe asks her, lifting her onto her lap. She gestures toward Lia’s plate, which contains only a scoop of white rice and a samosa with a single bite taken out of it.

Lia pushes it away. “Not hungry,” she says, sounding slightly irritable. Then, brightly, “Can I have a snack?”

Chloe stands up, setting Lia on her feet. “Roland, do you mind if I look around for something she’ll eat?”

“Oh, sure,” says Roland. “Let me think what I’ve got. Would you like some grapes, darling? Or some toast and jam?”

“No,” says Lia. “I want a snack from the freezer.”

The two of them head toward the refrigerator at the end of the room, negotiating between fruit and ice cream.

“Octavia Frost,” Roland says, turning to me. “I have to confess I haven’t read any of your books.”

I smile graciously. This is never a surprise. “Oh, no need …” I say and trail off. I look sideways at Milo, who’s looking down at the table, his face impassive. Joe’s looking at him, too, trying to gauge his reaction. I wish the subject hadn’t come up at all.

“But I’d like to read them,” Roland says, oblivious to the tension, if there is any, if I’m not making it up. “Which one should I start with?”

I’m never sure how to answer this question. I don’t particularly subscribe to the idea that writing books is analogous to having children—for one thing, your work on a book
ends
when you see it in print, though that’s clearly something I’ve begun to question—but there’s a sort of
Sophie’s Choice
aspect at play here that I don’t like.
Are you asking me which ones are good
, I want to say,
and which ones aren’t worth your time?

Here, at least, my choices are narrowed somewhat. Clearly I’m not going to mention
Tropospheric Scatter
in front of Milo. I think about what the question means:
Which story will I enjoy spending time in?
or
Which slice of yourself do you want to show me first?
And I say what I never say:
“Crybaby Bridge.”

Crybaby Bridge
is my first published novel. I wrote it the year after Mitch and Rosemary died, and I finished it in seven weeks. I’d heard stories before then about writers who had been so captured by an idea that they put aside the manuscripts they’d been working on for years, unable to rest until they put these new stories to paper. I’d never quite understood it; my own work had never felt quite that urgent. It was sort of a joke to me:
I’m jealous. Where’s
my
six-week book?

I can say now that it’s not an experience I’d like to repeat. It was a horrible time, sharp and raw. I just said that writing a book is not like having a child, but here the analogy seems apt: sometimes a quick birth just means the flesh will tear rather than stretch.

Crybaby Bridge
is a dark book, and a bit polarizing; readers either love it or hate it. But when I think about which novel I’m most proud of, which one is
me
to the greatest degree, that’s the one I always come back to.

“All right,” says Roland. “
Crybaby Bridge
it is.”

I resist my impulse to fill the air with talk—
Oh, I hope you like it
, and all that. He’ll either like it or he won’t. And it shouldn’t matter to me either way.