The Nobodies Album (27 page)

Excerpt from
CRYBABY BRIDGE
By Octavia Frost
REVISED ENDING

I watch you plummet, watch you struggle in the air, and for a moment I’m afraid. The part of me that remembers being alive, that knows the rhythm of breath drawn in and breath released, wonders if I have done something unforgivable.

As you come closer, I become aware of an absence of sound, the way you do when a refrigerator stops running its motor. I hadn’t quite realized it, but all this time I’ve been hearing something when I’m with you: an insect twitter, a note of low-frequency static. Something easily tuned out. But I search for it now, and I find it, fainter but still there. I listen as hard as I can.

In this moment, I feel what you feel. Terror. Anguish. And a desire to suck air into your lungs, stronger even than my hunger to pull you close. I understand suddenly how it’s been for you. You’re lost and frightened and bruised, and it’s not just because I am gone. And I try to think what I can do to ease your pain.

Right before you reach the water, you think of your father, and I see him as you do: a person, a living person, who adores you and who is blessed to be adored by you in return. My anger runs dry, and my love for you gathers like a storm cloud. That adrenaline, that superhuman mother strength, kicks in. And I catch you.

Somehow I’ve got you, and you’re swimming, and you’re crawling onto the dirt of the riverbank. Your friends are running down the hill, and I feel what you feel: Relief. Comfort. Something not far from joy.

The earth releases its hold on me, and the last thing I see before I slip away is you, sitting up, alive. I have saved you; it’s what I was always meant to do. And maybe that’s the reason I died. Or maybe it’s the reason I lived.

Chapter Fourteen

I haven’t said it yet, but of course I’m wondering if it’s possible that Kathy Moffett murdered her own daughter.

Let’s acknowledge, right off the bat, that I don’t know anything. There are whole lifetimes to contend with here, scaffolded with overlapping stories of love and resentment that I couldn’t possibly uncover. Any number of secrets might still come to the surface—love affairs and Mafia ties, gambling debts and paranoid delusions. It’s possible that there are many reasons why Roland might kill Bettina, or why Joe might, or Chloe, or for that matter Lisette Freyn.

But if the police have eliminated the wild cards—thwarted burglar, crazy fan—and if human beings are as complicated and as transparent as I’ve learned to expect them to be, then it comes down to the two people who loved Bettina most: Kathy and Milo.

Both possibilities are unthinkable, and both are easy to imagine. A spurned lover:
If I can’t have you, no one can
. A mother, falling into that place where the lines between parent and child blur:
I brought you into this world. You’re mine
.

Either way, the last moments of Bettina’s life were a desperate revelation for her; either way, her death was a lesson in the limits of love and the elasticity of human betrayal. If your house burns down and your children are killed, does it matter if it happens on Christmas Day or the ninth of November?

•  •  •

After closing the front door, Kathy Moffett stands for a moment in the entryway, the same way I did half an hour ago, absorbing the weighted stillness, the postmortem hush. She looks like hell, or maybe that’s putting it too strongly. Her clothes and makeup are as flawless as they were for the funeral, but her body sags as if she can barely summon the energy to make muscle and bone work together to hold her up.

I watch for only a few seconds before I start down the stairs. I can’t pretend I’m not here. I have to be an adult about this.

“Hello,” I call. There’s no way to avoid startling her, and she flinches as she turns. As she looks up at me, her expression is afraid, almost panicked, and then, as she recognizes me, it turns hard.

“I’m sorry,” I say as I reach the bottom step. “I didn’t mean to surprise you.” I hold out my hand, though the way she’s looking at me, I don’t expect her to take it. “I’m Octavia Frost. Milo’s mother.”

“I know who you are. I’m not going to shake your hand.” Her tone is odd, almost conversational. “I should spit in your face.”

I’m so shocked I almost laugh—who’s writing her dialogue?—but I stop myself. And because she’s decided we don’t have to follow the rules of conversation, and because I sometimes turn impulsive and inappropriate in the face of anger, I smile at her sweetly. “Likewise,” I say.

I regret it immediately, because being bitchy isn’t going to help anything. Kathy raises her eyebrows and shakes her head slowly, smiling in a way that suggests this is exactly the kind of behavior she’d expect from me, as though I’m the only one being childish here.

I sigh. “Okay. Let’s start again. I’m Octavia. I won’t try to shake your hand.”

Something occurs to her, and she looks around, a little bit wildly. “Is he here with you?”

“No. It’s just me.” I pause. “Listen, I know this is difficult, but I do want to say that I’m sorry for your loss.”

She shakes her head again, but she looks more haggard than angry. “Yeah, let’s not even,” she says, looking at the floor.

“I came by,” I say, and then I stop. Which one of us needs to explain her presence here? And do I really want to say that I came by to see how much work it will be to remove the damage done by the spill of her daughter’s blood?

“You have a key,” I say eventually. I’m trying to think of what needs to be said, and I settle on the key as a practical issue. If she won’t give it to me, I’ll have to arrange to have the locks changed.

She stares at me. “Incredible,” she says softly. “Yes, I have a key. I’ve always been welcome here.”

I accept the barb, let it hit its fleshy mark.

“I was going to get in touch with you,” I say. “To ask you what you’d like me to do with Bettina’s things.”

The anger that’s been starching her face since I came down the stairs seems to leach away, and she puts a hand out to steady herself on the wall. She looks suddenly lost. “Oh, God,” she says. She sounds like she can’t catch her breath. “I don’t know.”

I’m a little bewildered by her reaction. I’d assumed that she’d already thought about the need to sort through Bettina’s belongings; I thought that was why she’d come in the first place.

She’s breathing fast, and I’m afraid she’ll hyperventilate. “Okay,” I say. “It’s going to be okay.” I hesitate, then put out my arms, guide her into the dining room, and settle her on the long velvet banquette.

“Just sit,” I say. “I’ll get you some water.”

I go into the kitchen and open cabinets, looking for a glass. Who picked these out, I wonder when I find the right cupboard and pull out a narrow blue tumbler—Milo or Bettina? Who picked out those dish towels and that toaster oven and those heavy, expensive-looking saucepans? Did they go shopping together, like newlyweds setting up house? Or maybe it wasn’t either of them. Maybe when you’re rich and busy, you just hire someone to furnish your kitchen for you.

I open the refrigerator, looking for bottled water. There isn’t any, but the smell of something just beginning to rot gives me another item to add to my list. I take a moment to look over the inventory, the groceries Milo and Bettina expected they’d be eating together. Soy milk, several varieties of mustard, some sort of salad greens in the crisper. Half an avocado, long since brown. It’s like the concert rider I read online: raw material that refuses to shape itself into any kind of narrative.

I find ice in the freezer and fill the glass with water from the tap. Kathy’s sitting where I left her, slumped and small. I put the glass in front of her and sit down in a heavy wooden chair on the opposite side of the table.

“It was almost a week ago,” she says. She puts her hand on the glass of water but doesn’t pick it up. She sounds incredulous, though I can’t tell if she thinks a week sounds like too long or too short a period of time to describe what she’s gone through. “A week ago I was here and she was here.”

I nod, though she’s not really looking at me; she’s looking at nothing, or else at her hand curved around the blue glass.

“She was so cute when she was little,” she says. This is the moment when the interaction crosses a threshold for me. This is where, when I’m telling the story later, I’ll say that it “started to get weird.” But it’s not really that she’s saying anything so strange; it’s that she’s shifting my role, without my permission. She’s laying out new rules: she’s going to talk, and I’m going to listen, and I don’t really have a say in the matter. When I’ve found myself in situations like this before, taken hostage by a conversation on a plane or someplace else where escape is impossible, my response has always been to draw back just far enough to become a spectator. Material, I always think. Keep listening. There might be something good.

“I remember her on her first day of school,” she says. “She was wearing this little white dress with flowers embroidered on it that I’d brought back for her from Mexico. Whenever I’d go away someplace, she’d go stay with her dad, and when I came home, she’d always come running up to me and hug me and say, ‘Mommy, I missed you the most.’”

I interrupt. “Her dad?” I ask.

“Roland. She always thought of him as her dad.” Her voice gets tight. “I still say he was.”

And this is sort of what I mean when I say that I’m looking for material: I’m waiting for the moment when the speaker reveals something about herself that she didn’t mean to reveal. A quick glimpse beneath the surface, like rolling back a corner of freshly laid sod. It’s a small thing that wriggles into view: Kathy doesn’t trust the results of the paternity test. Maybe not so strange—we all have our quirks and our unspoken conspiracy theories, and it’s certainly true that lab workers are as prone to human error as anyone else. Roland is a rich and influential man who might be able to make things appear to go his way, and Kathy knows better than anyone else where she was and who she was with when her child was conceived.

But. It’s enough to tell me that when it suits her purpose, she can be flexible about things that most people take for granted. It’s enough to tell me that she considers truth at least a little bit fluid.

“She was always so well behaved,” Kathy says, rubbing at the condensation on her glass. “Such a good little girl.”

There’s a pause. “From what I hear, she grew up into a wonderful woman,” I say. Keep her talking. You never know what you’ll find.

She looks at me. Her expression is almost challenging. “We were best friends,” she says. “We talked on the phone twice a day, at least. She never made a decision without getting my opinion.”

I nod. “That’s rare.”

“It is. Very rare. You wouldn’t know. It’s not the same with sons.”

You wouldn’t know about sons
, I want to say, but I don’t. “I had a daughter. But I never got to know her as an adult.”

She looks at me appraisingly. “That’s right,” she says. “I forgot about that.” I wait to see if she’s going to add any of the usual things one is supposed to say here—“I’m sorry,” or “What a terrible loss”—and I’m interested that she doesn’t.

“Still,” she says. “You’ve got one left, even if he is a psychopath. You’ve got …” She looks at me as if she’s accusing me of someting. “You’ve got a
grandchild
.”

I don’t say anything. “Which is worse?” Kathy asks, watching me intently. “To lose a child to an accident and still have one left, or to lose a child to violence and be left all alone?”

I stare at her, stunned. I’m not sure, but I think she may actually expect me to answer, and for a moment I have an impulse to modify her equation, add in the variable of lost husbands and ask her how that changes the balance. “It’s always a tragedy,” I say finally. My voice is a little bit shaky, and I pause before I continue. “There is no better or worse.”

She meets my gaze and gives me an odd smile. When she speaks, her tone is singsong, as if she’s talking to a small child. “Someone is lying,” she says.

The effect the phrase has on me is almost physical, a jolt, like coming to a sudden stop in a car. I picture the slip of paper, the words written with such force that they’re practically embossed. I look at her face, but it tells me nothing.

She stands and picks up her water glass, carries it into the kitchen. And then, because I expect it’s coming, because it’s the inevitable destination of all those airplane monologues across the armrest, I offer her this, my voice as soft as if it were coming from her own mind: “You should write a book.”

She pauses, smiles almost tenderly. “I should. I bet it would sell a million copies.”

She pours the water into the sink, ice cubes clanking against metal.

“I’m not entirely sure why you’re here,” I say. It sounds sharp, rude, but I feel a need to regain control of the situation. “I mean, here at the house, today. Are there things that you left here that you wanted to pick up?”

She looks down, sets the glass carefully in the sink. “I don’t know,” she says slowly. “I guess I just wanted to be here one more time. I didn’t know if I’d get another chance.” She looks at me. “Actually, I’d like to go upstairs. Before I leave. If that’s okay with you.”

I look at her face; her expression is blank. “All right. But just so you know, nothing’s been … cleaned up.”

She nods. I follow her to the hallway and up the stairs. I’m torn between thinking I should give her some privacy and wanting to emphasize that she no longer has free rein here. When she goes into the master bedroom, I stop just inside the door. I turn my body away, so that I don’t appear to be watching her, though I can still see her reflection in the mirror over the dresser.

She walks slowly through the room, staying at the edge, reaching out to brush a hand along the wall, the shade of a lamp, a book on the bedside table. Memorizing, maybe; creating a sensory impression. I don’t know.

She circles around, then walks to the center of the room and stops in front of the largest of the bloodstains. She looks down at it for a moment, starkly curious, then reaches out a foot and brushes at it with the toe of her shoe.

“I know you’re watching me,” she says, her eyes still on the floor.

“Sorry,” I say. I don’t stop looking.

She stares at the rug for what feels like a long time, maybe a minute or more. When she looks up, her face is set into lines I can’t quite place. Irritation? Distaste?

“I guess I’m done,” she says. She walks past me, out of the room, without looking back, stepping on the bloodstain as she goes.

I follow Kathy back down the stairs and lead her to the front door. She stops and looks around, a little bit dazed.

“I can’t make it be okay,” she says wonderingly. She shakes her head. “I pushed a piece of hair away from her face. That was the last thing I did.”

I nod. She mentioned that at the funeral, too. I know how strong that impulse can be, to invoke details, to enumerate the fine points. There’s hope that if we examine the sequence of events carefully enough, we might find a loophole.