The Nobodies Album (22 page)

A: Thank you. (Pause) He’s a complicated person, but I’m sure … I mean, as sure as I can be … No. He didn’t do it. He couldn’t have.

Q:
Of course
.

A: And I have a favor to ask you: do you mind including a link to my most recent book?

By the time I finish reading I’m seething, and I’m also feeling the first loose ripples of panic. This is not me—I didn’t say a single one of those things—but it’s out there with my name on it, ready to be plucked and quoted and fastened tightly to the public idea of who I am. And if Milo should see it … well, he would know it’s a fake, wouldn’t he? The facts aren’t right: I hardly ever went on book tours, and when I did, it was never for more than three or four days at a time. And we had one lone pet the whole time he was growing up, a dog who lived to the ripe old age of fifteen. Oh, and for God’s sake—I hope he’d know this much—I would never have to stop and think to remember how old he was when Mitch and Rosemary died.

I don’t know if this is a joke dreamed up by the FreeMilo people—I scan the interview again for some note of satire, but I’m not seeing it—or if there’s really someone out there saying she’s me and granting interviews in my name. Whatever the case, I can’t imagine what the purpose of it all might be. The Octavia who’s interviewed here sounds a bit stupid, and certainly fussier than I am, and she makes a few unsavory implications about Milo (
He hit his sister! Perhaps he killed the family pets!
), but she doesn’t say anything particularly shocking or revelatory. What unnerves me about it is that it seems to be an attempt—a clumsy and not very creative one—to imagine what it might be like to live inside my head.

I send Anna a second e-mail, this one rather frantic, with a link to the Web site. I’m not really afraid that we won’t be able to fix this. Anna will have some ideas, and I’ll probably just have to make a statement that I had nothing to do with the interview. What I’m afraid of is the damage already done, the false witness borne and released into the digital distance. We’ve come to an age where no word can be unwritten, no idea unthought. And in the land of the anonymous, the attributed quote is king.

My fear is that years from now—perhaps after I am dead, my own ending immutable and fixed in marble—a reader will come across a book of mine and decide she wants to learn more about who I was. She will do her research, and among the billions of documents hovering like ghosts, she will find this one.

My fear is that she—this reader I’ve imagined, who may or may not ever exist—will believe that this is how I felt about my son.

I try to calm down. If I don’t distract myself, I’ll never fall asleep. Impulsively, I do a search for “Roland Nysmith.” Born in 1955 in Birmingham, England, to a railway worker and his wife. Moved to London at the age of seventeen and briefly studied history at King’s College, where he met his first wife, Adelaide Fry, to whom he was married from 1974 to 1977. The Misters formed in 1973; their first hit single was “The Girl in the Window,” from the album
War Town
, which was released in February 1975 and spent three weeks at number one on the British charts.

It’s all so dry and colorless, even the events that I know must have mattered to him: an arrest for possession of cocaine in Germany in 1981; an Oscar for the title song from the 1989 film
Gray Days;
a bitter and very public divorce from his second wife, model Brooke Audley, in 1992. Why do we think that knowing the events of someone’s life will give us insight into the person they are? Certainly we react to the things that happen to us; we are not unchanged by them. But there’s no formula to it. You may know that a cascade of water can wear away stone, but you can’t predict what shape the rock will take at any given moment. I fall asleep thinking of rushing water and jutting stones, root balls and cataracts and swift-moving streams.

•  •  •

When I wake up, it’s to the sound of my phone vibrating against the surface of the table next to my bed. I look at the number. It’s Anna. I clear my throat, try to summon a tone of alertness, and answer the call.

“Octavia,” she says. “Am I calling too early?”

“No, not at all,” I say. I look at the clock; it’s eight a.m. In general, I would say that’s a little early, but I’ll forgive her. “So what’s the news?”

“Well, first of all, I did get your e-mail about the interview on the FreeMilo Web site, and I don’t think it’s something we have to worry about. I’ll get in touch with the legal department at Farraday on Monday, and they’ll probably issue a cease-and-desist order. If you can go ahead and put a statement on your Web site, making it clear that you had nothing to do with it, we should be in good shape.”

“Okay. Great. And you said you’d talked to Lisa about the manuscript …?”

“Yes, I did.” Her tone changes from businesslike to something I’d classify as cheerful but nervous. “She told me that they’d like to make an offer on
The Nobodies Album
.”

My response to this news is more mixed than I would have anticipated. Relief and validation—
they like it; I haven’t made a fool of myself
—but it’s tempered with a slight feeling of dread I’d rather not investigate too closely.

“That’s great,” I say, after a minute. “You know, I’ve thought all along that this could be a really interesting, groundbreaking project, but I know it’s a little out there.”

“Right,” says Anna. She doesn’t sound as happy as I do.

“So what are they offering?” I ask. I prepare myself for a low number. My last book didn’t sell, and this one’s inherently risky.

“Well,” she says, “what they’re offering is actually a two-book deal.”

“Okay,” I say. “That’s a good thing, right?”

“I think it is,” she says. “The stipulation is that the second book—and there’s some leeway here for you to make this your own—the second book will be a memoir. About you and Milo.”

Of course. Of course. I can’t believe I didn’t see this coming.

Anna presses on: “Now, whatever you decide, I’m behind you a hundred percent. But while you’re thinking about it, I want to emphasize that they’re very clearly leaving the subject matter up to you. Whatever angle you want to take is fine. So I imagine that potentially you could do this in a way that could be very positive for Milo, and for his public image.”

She tells me the amount. It’s a lot, more than any advance I’ve ever been offered.

“I’m going to need to think about it,” I say finally. “When do they want an answer?”

“They want to get moving on this fairly quickly, so probably Monday. Do you have any … preliminary thoughts about what your answer might be?”

“No,” I say, a little sharply. “None at all.”

“Okay,” she says. “Because the other piece of this is that if you do decide to do a book like this, then maybe we ought to open it up to other publishers. I think there would be a huge amount of interest.”

I just need to end this phone call. “Well, clearly there’s a lot to think about.” My voice sounds hollow. “I’ll let you know on Monday, okay?”

“Okay,” she says. “If you have any thoughts or questions over the weekend, feel free to give me a call.”

“I will,” I say. “Bye.”

I hang up before I’ve even heard her respond. I lie back on the bed and cradle a pillow against my chest. And before I know it, I’m crying, sloppy and ugly and loud. I don’t think about why, whether it’s just this news or the built-up accumulation of the whole goddamned week. I just cry until my throat is sore and my head aches.

When I’m done, I lie in bed for a few more minutes, my mind blissfully blank. And when I get up, without even realizing it, I’ve made a decision. I pack up my things and go downstairs to check out of the hotel. While I’m waiting for my turn at the desk, I call Milo and tell him I’m coming to stay.

BR
:
So would you agree with the idea that writing can be therapeutic?

OF
: Well, certainly writing can be therapeutic, but when you’re writing something that you hope will be artistic and that you’d like to share with the world, therapy can’t be your main goal. I mean, it may be therapeutic to write “I hate my mother” on a piece of paper, but that doesn’t mean anyone’s going to want to read it. That said, it’s certainly true that the events of a writer’s life, including her emotional life, can and do influence her work.

BR
:
So are there aspects of your own books that are autobiographical?

OF
: Well, sure, but not always in a way that’s obvious to anyone but me. If you look at my books, there’s no character who shares my exact biography. There’s no character who’s supposed to be me, and there are no characters who are based exclusively on anyone I know. I don’t do “thinly veiled.” But still, my life is in there. It’s oblique, but it’s in there.
    For example, my novel
The Rule of the Chalice
was very much shaped by the fact that I had lost my husband and my daughter a few years earlier. Even though their deaths were not violent, there was a certain moment in my grieving when I started thinking about blood and violence—what it means to save a life, what it means to take a life—in a way I never had before. And the novel grew out of that.

Excerpt from an interview with Octavia Frost in the
Barnstable Review,
February 1998

From the Jacket Copy for
THE RULE OF THE CHALICE
By Octavia Frost

(Farraday Books, 1995)

N
ikki is a woman facing enormous tragedy: her young son, Caleb, has been abducted and murdered by her former boyfriend, Gordie. In the aftermath, Nikki makes an unusual career change: she takes a job with a cleaning company that specializes in CTS—crime and trauma scene—cleanup.

As Gordie’s trial progresses and Nikki becomes accustomed to this new and difficult kind of work, she retreats further and further into her grief. Then she meets Scott, a gay man whose partner has recently been murdered, and his young daughter, Daisy. Through this new friendship, Nikki finds a way to mourn Caleb and still move forward, and to forgive herself for that most bittersweet crime: continuing to live.

Excerpt from
THE RULE OF THE CHALICE
By Octavia Frost
ORIGINAL ENDING

The day Gordie was sentenced to die, Nikki walked out of the courthouse, past the reporters and the protesters both pro and con, and went to her car feeling nothing. It wasn’t until a half hour later, pulling into the parking lot of a supermarket where she’d stopped to buy milk and soda, that she began to cry. She parked crookedly and put her hands over her face. She wept until she was almost screaming, and she didn’t know if it was for herself or for Caleb, or even for the woman she had once hoped would be her mother-in-law, who had been unable to keep herself from moaning out loud when the verdict was read. Or maybe it was because something was supposed to have ended today, but nothing was different, except that now someone else was going to die, and she herself had played an undeniable role in the chain of causation. The phrase “blood on my hands” came into her head, but that seemed to be just another excuse for her mind to bring up all the images of literal blood she’d seen in the slides the prosecution had presented: the spatter patterns on the legs of Gordie’s pants, the fingerprint on the steering wheel of his car, the footmarks and drag stains that had appeared like a holy vision when the detectives sprayed Luminol on his basement floor. She stayed in her car for a long time, even after she had finished crying. She sat in a kind of hollow stupor, feeling both thankful and sorry to be living in a time when she could be sure that no one would knock on her window to ask if she was okay.

When she got home—she’d decided to skip the groceries, though it meant she’d be drinking her coffee black in the morning—Nikki checked her messages. There was one from her mother, who’d heard the news about Gordie and was “thrilled.” “Call me,” she said, “and we can celebrate.” Her voice was caustic, and while Nikki understood the depth of her anger, and indeed had spent a lot of time herself looking upward from that same pit, she couldn’t match it right now. She decided to put off returning the call until tomorrow.

Scott had also called, and also knew what had happened at the courthouse, though his response was more tempered. “Hope you’re doing okay,” he said. “Call me if you want to talk.” He also reminded her that Saturday was moving day, and that if Nikki still wanted to help out, she should come over around nine.

Finally, there was a message from Jeremy, saying that they had a couple of new jobs and that if she felt up to coming into work in the morning, he was going to put her on a meth lab decon project over on the west side. Nikki knew, from an e-mail she’d gotten from Vera, that there was also a team working on a murder scene in Fairlawn Heights, a high-profile case that had been in the news over the past few weeks. Nikki imagined Jeremy trying to decide where to put her, wondering which location would be less traumatic for her during this particular week, and settling for chemicals over blood, physical hazards over emotional ones.

I could quit, she thought, and waited to see how that felt.

Jeremy had given her an out the day he hired her: “Not everyone can handle this,” she remembered him saying. “Sometimes people just wake up one day and feel like they can’t come into work. I like two weeks’ notice, of course, but I understand that you’ve got to look out for yourself first.”

It was nineteen months now since Caleb had died, and over a year since she’d seen the CNN story that had started her thinking about this kind of work. She had gone into it thinking—what? That it was good money, an important service, a way to help people; yes. But also that she owed a debt to these dead, to their terror and their confusion and their peace. Because she, in a convoluted way, had taken a life herself.

Cause and effect again, strings of events forged into chains, so that she could see the places where her own actions affected someone else’s. Caleb would not have died:

• if she had never gone to Tara’s Christmas party;
  

• if, at that party, she had not given Gordie her phone number;
  

• if she had broken up with him sooner or not at all;
  

• if she had thought to change the list that told Caleb’s teachers which adults were allowed to pick him up from school.
  

He would not have died if she had been on time that day. He would not have died if she’d gone to Gordie’s house immediately instead of calling the police. And so on, and so on, and so on.

But here was the thing: sometime in the ten months since she’d started working for CTSO, another link had been added to the chain. Her work was still about Caleb—it would be, always—but it was about something else now, too. It had to do with respect. It had to do with understanding that
here
a heart had beat and then not,
here
a breath had been exhaled and never repeated.

Nikki had been raised Catholic, and she remembered that once during communion, one of the hosts had fallen during the transfer from the priest’s fingers to a parishioner’s mouth. Though Nikki had already made her first communion, she wouldn’t have understood the significance of the moment if it hadn’t been for the adults around her. Her mother, standing behind her in line, drew a sharp breath and squeezed her hands tight on Nikki’s shoulders. The woman at the front of the line, the intended recipient, cried out softly. And as the priest knelt down to retrieve the wafer, Nikki could see the distress in his tilted face.

The priest picked up the host and put it into his own mouth, then brushed the floor with his hand, perhaps looking for fragments that might have broken off. Then, in an event that seemed to Nikki much more shocking than the actual dropping of the bread, he bent forward and licked the marble where the host had lain.

Nikki looked around her, but no one else seemed as surprised as she was. The priest took a small white cloth from the altar and dropped it on the spot where the wafer had fallen. Then he took a breath and continued with the service, moving on to the next host, the next waiting tongue.

Later Nikki had asked her mother about what had happened, and her mother had told her that when the consecrated host, the body of Christ, falls onto a profane surface, the priest must himself eat any pieces of it he can find. Later, after mass, he must wash the area with water three times, being careful that no crumbs are left behind. And afterward, her mother said, the water used to cleanse the spot cannot be poured into a regular sink but must be emptied into the soil or into a special drain that will return it directly to the earth. If wine were to spill from the chalice, she added, then the linen cloths used to wipe up the liquid—and even any item of clothing that had been splashed or stained—would have to be burned. Nikki had been impressed by the ritual of it, the solemnity accorded to a task that to her seemed like nothing more than a minor chore.

Now, with her strong stomach and her hazmat suit, Nikki had taken on a job that was not so different. She went into rooms where bodies had broken apart, spaces made foul by spilled blood and all the liquids a living body carries. She cleaned and she purified, and in her careful and methodical work, she honored the dead by recognizing their humanity. And she smoothed the path for those, like herself, who had been left behind among the living.

Nikki called Jeremy’s voice mail and told him to expect her in the morning.

•  •  •

Three days later, on Saturday morning, Nikki drove to Scott’s house. Daisy opened the door before Nikki had a chance to knock.

“I saw you,” Daisy said, hugging Nikki’s thighs. “I saw your car.”

“You did?” Nikki asked, bending to pick the girl up. This feeling of holding a small body, arms folding around her neck, feet knocking into her legs … there was nothing else like it. “Well, now I see you, too.”

Scott came into the room and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “How are you?” he asked in a tone that suggested he wanted a real answer.

“Not bad,” she said. She thought for a minute, and then said it again. “Really, I’m not bad.”

Scott nodded. “Glad to hear it,” he said.

The living room was filled with boxes stacked neatly against the walls. There wouldn’t be much to do beyond carrying them out to the U-Haul and unloading them across town. The house seemed smaller, in that way that houses do when their contents have been packed away.

Nikki looked at the fresh paint, the new carpeting that she herself had installed, and thought about the room as it had looked the first time she saw it: the dark stain just a few feet in from the door, the veil of red dots on the wall. The house hadn’t sold yet, and might not for a while; Scott probably wouldn’t get the price he wanted for it. It was always difficult to sell a house where a murder had occurred, and the specifics of this case—the fact that Ty had walked into the house to find a man with a gun on his way out with a laptop and Scott’s mother’s jewelry—called the safety of the neighborhood into question. But no one could look at this room and say that it looked like a crime had been committed there. She had done good work.

Nikki knew that Gordie’s house had been sold some time ago to help cover his legal fees, but she still didn’t know if it was CTSO that had done the cleanup work, or another company, or even Gordie’s mother, on her hands and knees with latex gloves and a bottle of Clorox. She’d never asked Jeremy, and she probably wouldn’t.

She had thought sometimes that maybe she should move, find a new place, like Scott and Daisy were doing. But it wasn’t the same; her house had not been the scene of Caleb’s murder. She could picture Caleb playing with his Matchbox cars on the kitchen floor without picturing his blood spread in a jagged stain beneath him. The place where he died was not the place where he lived, she thought. For a moment it seemed more profound than it really was.

Two more of Scott’s friends had arrived to help. They all worked together, carrying boxes out to the truck, finding small items here and there that Daisy could handle. When the truck was full, Scott locked the back and got ready to make the first trip over to the new house.

“Are we taking Papa with us?” Daisy asked suddenly. Everyone froze.

“It’s okay,” Scott said in a low voice meant for the other adults. “They don’t really get it at this age. It’s too abstract.”

He picked up Daisy and kissed the top of her head. “We’re taking our thoughts and our memories and our pictures of Papa,” he said. “Now, what do you think? Do you want to ride in the big truck?”

“Yeah!” Daisy said, bouncing up and down in Scott’s arms.

Scott tossed his house keys to Nikki. “Would you lock up?” he asked. She nodded but didn’t speak; inexplicably, she felt close to tears. She thought of Caleb, his chipmunk cheeks, the blue of his eyes. Her boy.

All children are lost, eventually. Nikki remembered Caleb on his fourth birthday, crying because he’d never be three again, and three was the only thing he could ever remember being. If he’d lived another ten years, or seventy, that little boy would be just as gone as he was now. It was like a logic problem: given the same eventual outcome, why was it that one ending was so much worse than another?

Scott lifted Daisy and buckled her into the truck. “You want to ride with us or follow us?” he asked Nikki.

“I’ll meet you there,” she said. She watched Scott and his friends get into their vehicles, start up the engines, and pull away.

When they were gone, she sat down on the grass. As long as she lived—and it might be a very long time—the central fact of her life would be that her little boy had suffered alone, that he had called out for her and she didn’t come. And as long as that continued to be true, she would pay her penance. She would stay behind after others had gone on their way. She would lock doors and clean up. She would spend her days alone, apart, ringing the doorbells of the bereaved and crossing the thresholds of houses where something terrible had happened.