The Nobodies Album (28 page)

We stand in the foyer, neither of us moving toward the door. “She was planning to go to bed after you left?” I ask.

She nods. “She was tired. She told me she loved me. I went over and over it with the police.”

There’s something that hasn’t seemed right to me in any of the versions of the story I’ve heard. Not for a mother who managed to set up a domestic violence foundation before the week was out.

“Why did you leave her here alone?” I ask. “Weren’t you worried that Milo would come back?”

She gives me a scathing look, as if I’m deliberately trying to be hurtful. “She wasn’t alone,” she says. Her voice is fierce.

I stare at her. “She wasn’t?”

“No,” she says, sounding angry and tired and sick of everything. “And I told the police that, too. Her friend was here. Chloe.”

•  •  •

When people ask me how I decided to become a writer, I tell them that it happened so long ago I can’t even remember. I have the perfect literary myth of origin: I was making up stories before I could even write them down. But it was a long, long time before I knew what I wanted to say.

In a way, Sara Ferdinand wasn’t so far off when she said that the deaths of my husband and daughter had given me my life’s material. I was thirty-four when they died, and I’d been writing my first novel for more than ten years. Circumstances got in the way—I had children, I had jobs—but I can see now that the real problem wasn’t the lack of time or energy. It was the lack of perspective. Too much to write about, too many possible directions to go in. And then came cataclysm and shock and the disintegration of all that was normal. And in the clarity of the narrowing world, I wrote
Crybaby Bridge
.

It’s hard for me to know how to talk about the day they died. I don’t mean that it’s painful, though of course it is; I mean that it’s hard for me to find the right point of entry. There are too many different ways in. Think of an outdoor arena—a baseball field, perhaps. You’re going to a game that will be played outdoors, but in order to get to your seat, you have to travel a network of concrete corridors and stairways. You have to go inside in order to get out again. Everything is dim and close and damp, but you find your door and go through it, and there it is: the day, the field, the game already in progress. It’s stunning, the grass green like in a storybook, the drama below you being enacted by figures you can identify only by the colors of their uniforms. It’s vivid, that’s what I’m getting at; your eyes need a moment to adjust. Now imagine that you go back inside and walk a little way, in order to emerge from a different corridor. The view is only a few degrees off from the last one you saw, but it’s enough to change things. You notice different details; there are different voices cheering or booing, and different pieces of litter, and different men selling beer. The events taking place on the grass are the same ones you’d see if you’d stayed in the previous section, but you’re seeing them from a different angle. Can you really say that you’re watching the same game?

What I mean to say is this: How do I begin to trace the circumference of that terrible globe of a day? Do I begin with that morning when we woke up, a family of four, in a hotel room in Fish Camp, California, and just keep going until I reach the moment when Milo and I returned to our room at midnight by ourselves? It’s important to know that we were on vacation, that we’d flown to Los Angeles, rented a car, and driven up the coast. But do I go all the way back to me and Mitch sitting on our couch with maps and guidebooks? The call to the travel agent, the children fidgeting on the plane? When you’re talking about an event that redrew the lines of a family, how can you possibly say that any detail is unimportant?

Okay, stop. Begin with the facts. It was July 13, 1992. Milo was nine, Rosemary was six. We’d planned a ten-day vacation, and this was day number seven. We got dressed and had breakfast, and we left to spend the day at Yosemite.

We were not a particularly outdoorsy family, and our plans were modest. See the giant sequoias, take a walk, have a picnic lunch. We hiked an easy path and spread a blanket at the edge of the Merced River, just above a ledge called Table Rock. We ate sandwiches we’d brought from our hotel, and the children took off their shoes to wade. Mitch and I lay on the blanket and enjoyed our first uninterrupted conversation of the day.

I remember that my sandwich was roast beef and that Mitch’s was ham and cheese. I remember that it was warm and breezy and I felt like I could fall asleep. I remember the easy way that Mitch and I were touching: his head tilted against mine, my arm stretched across his chest. I remember leaning in, just once, to kiss him on the neck.

Perhaps you’d think that the scene was so idyllic I let my guard down. But in those places where we still allow nature to reign, I’ve always been more attuned to danger than anywhere else. I know how easily a foot can slip, a tree branch can crack. This wildness, this splendor, is not here for our enjoyment. We are small and so very breakable. I know the rules: Don’t lean over an edge for a spectacular photo. Don’t lure an animal close enough to feed it a potato chip. If you drop your sunglasses off a precipice, give them up for lost.

But the water was low and calm, or at least that’s how it looked. There had been signs in other spots along our path, warnings and cautions, but there weren’t any here. The children just wanted to put their feet in; they were never out of our sight. I thought the choices I was making were sensible ones. We both did. And it was several minutes before I noticed that Rosemary had taken Milo’s binoculars into the water with her.

That spring and summer Milo had become interested, to a small degree, in bird-watching, and Mitch had been working to encourage that interest. The two of them had spent much of the plane ride paging through field guides, and Mitch had presented the binoculars to Milo as a surprise that morning, no more than three hours earlier. And now, in the midst of a squabble I hadn’t quite been aware of, Rosemary was balancing on a rock several feet from the shore, holding the binoculars above her head, and Milo was just below her, about to grab her ankles to pull her down. I stood up and called his name, sharply, then hers, and in an instant Mitch was in the water, moving toward them. I stood and watched; for reasons I still can’t fully explain, I didn’t move a single muscle. I was already living on the plane of imagined loss, my life divided for a moment between the certainty that there was still time to avert disaster and the equal certainty that something terrible and irreversible was about to happen. I had been in that place many times before, seeing one of my children chase a Frisbee into the street or reach for a pot of boiling water on the stove, and I’d always emerged without incident, clutching a little too tightly at one small arm or another, squeezing and scolding at the same time. But this time there was a splash, and Rosemary disappeared from view.

Every area of study has its own vocabulary, and sometimes the language is rich, fertile, unexpectedly lovely. In the hours and months that followed, as I spoke to park rangers and police officers and, eventually, read reports of the incident, I was to learn a whole new tongue. Words and phrases that had seemed innocuous before came out of hiding, revealing terrible new meanings. Cataracts. Root balls. Swift-moving water. Waterfalls, in all their varieties: fan, horsetail, punchbowl, plunge. Tied to language as I am, when I think of that day, there’s a sort of dark poetry attached to it. Words repeated, like in a sestina or a villanelle. Rushing water, jutting stones. Rock steps. Cascade.

That stretch of river
was
calm; I wasn’t wrong about that. But sometimes when water is forced between large stones it becomes channelized, creating a passage that moves much faster than the surrounding currents. A park worker named Mike explained it to me, striking a balance between sympathy and not-quite-scolding. They were horrified and sad, the rangers and rescue workers, and I’ll bet some of them think about it still. But they were not in the least surprised.

Rushing water, jutting stones. Rosemary was wearing a blue sundress, and within a few seconds there was no dot of color to train my eyes to. Mitch stepped up onto the rock she’d fallen from and searched wildly for a moment.

Root balls, cataracts. Swift-moving water.

I don’t know if Mitch was able to spot her then or not, but I saw him make the decision to go after her. He jumped into the current and was carried away by the flow.

A drowning person does not cry out. A drowning person turns his face upward and tries to inhale. By the time I, dry and safe, could draw breath enough to scream, there was no sign of either one of them.

And then come the stark details, the words devoid of anything like beauty. The five hours it took to recover the bodies. The makeshift dam the rescue workers built out of plywood to divert the water so they could get to them. Rosemary’s clothes torn off by the current. Mitch’s foot tangled in the roots of a fallen tree. Both of them less than a hundred feet from where they’d begun. Milo hysterical, me a silent shell. Flying home three days later, just the two of us, knowing the bodies were in the plane underneath our seats.

Of course that day and all of the days that followed it became part of my work. It didn’t feel like a choice. The profanity of death and the sacredness of grief: what more important material is there? When, in each of my subsequent books, I took time to pause and consider what we had had and what we had lost, it was something like the Muslim call to prayer. Such a powerful act. Imagine taking the time to stop your ordinary life five times a day in order to turn to something holy. A supplication, a reminder. Bearing witness. A summing-up of belief. And if, in my own life and in my own work, I didn’t exactly fall to my knees and touch my forehead to the ground, I performed a sort of internal bowing. I honor you. I’m thinking of nothing else. I bear witness that Mitchell and Rosemary lived on this earth. I bear witness that they were loved. I bear witness that they are not gone from my body, from my life. Make haste to remember them. Make haste toward prayer.

“It is ten years since our children left.”

Thirteenth-century entry in the town chronicle of Hamelin, Germany

Chapter Fifteen

As I stand outside the house, waiting for Roland to pick me up, I’m thinking about terror and blood-spill, the purposeful breaking of human bones. I’m thinking that I forgot to look up to see the cast-off drops on the ceiling.

Roland pulls up and rolls to a stop. “All right?” he asks pleasantly as I get in the car.

“More or less. You just missed Kathy Moffett.”

“She was
here
?” He looks over at me, and I nod. “What did she want?”

“Wasn’t really clear. I’m sure she thought nobody would be here. She said she just wanted to be in the house one more time. Because it reminds her of Bettina.”

It’s possible that it’s the truth. People grieve in different ways, though I’m certain that I will never again, as long as I live, walk along the banks of the Merced River.

He shakes his head slowly. “She’s an odd duck.”

“You must know her pretty well?” I say.

He considers it. “Well, yes and no. Like I said earlier, I spent a fair bit of time with Bettina when she was little, though not so much with Kathy. Kathy adored Bettina, but she wasn’t a real stay-at-home-mum type, and it happened pretty often that she’d go on holiday with a boyfriend and leave Bettina to stay with me for a few weeks. But later on we had a falling-out—Kathy and I, I mean—and she made it difficult for me to see Bettina. I missed most of her teenage years, I’m afraid.”

“I’m sorry to hear it,” I say. “Must have been quite a falling-out.” He doesn’t answer right away, and I backtrack. “I’m sorry. None of my business.”

He shrugs. “Not like it’s a secret. It’s what I was talking about earlier when I said there was a bit of a saga. Kathy always said that Bettina was my daughter, and I took her word for it—the timing was right, and so on.” Scattered raindrops are starting to land on the windshield; he turns on the wipers. “But eventually I got married, and my wife convinced me that we should double-check, you know. We’d talked about having kids, and she was thinking about inheritance and whatnot. She didn’t want our children to have to share if Bettina wasn’t really mine.”

“And you found out she wasn’t.”

“Yeah. To make a long story short. There was a lot of drama in the middle. Kathy didn’t want to consent to the test, and we ended up battling it out in court. I wish now … well, who knows what I wish, at this point.”

He looks worn out, and it occurs to me that he’s lost Bettina twice. I’ve sometimes thought of my own relationship with Milo in those terms: that even before this recent estrangement, I’d lost hold of him once before. Felt him pulled away by the undertow because I was busy trying to keep my own lungs from filling with water. But it’s not true, not in the way it is for Roland. This isn’t an ending. I haven’t lost Milo yet.

“I would have liked,” he says, “to go to the funeral. Would’ve meant a lot to me.”

His face falls unguarded for a moment, and he looks tired and miserable. I feel a rush of tenderness that surprises me; I almost—but not quite—reach out to touch his shoulder. I don’t know what he’s thinking, but I imagine he’s organizing the events of his history, arranging them in a row so he can look at them all at once. Tracing back, like running a finger along a map to follow the curling line of a river. All those years of accumulated decisions and acts of chance—is there a place where he could have made a choice that would have led him anyplace other than here?

•  •  •

It’s late afternoon, and by the time we get back to the house, Sam Zalakis’s car is gone. Roland excuses himself—he has a dinner to go to and needs to get ready—and I get myself a bottle of water from the refrigerator and go upstairs to see if I can find Milo.

He’s in the library, walking around restlessly, apparently deep in thought. I knock on the doorjamb to let him know I’m here. He looks up, though it seems to take a minute before he actually sees me.

“Hi,” I say. “How was your meeting?”

“Good.” He stops by the table, taps his fingers on it. “Maybe.”

I sit down in one of the big wing chairs. “Did Sam have anything new?”

“Yeah, a couple of things.” He starts moving around again, pacing. He’s not agitated, exactly, but there’s an anxious energy to him, a sense of nerve endings exposed to the air. “The big one is that the blood that was on me—according to the analysis, I didn’t have the kind of spatter on my clothes that you’d expect to see if I was standing right there at the moment of impact.” He picks up an open can of soda from a bookshelf and takes a sip, sets it down on a different shelf. “So that’s in our favor. And the prosecution won’t be able to argue that I had time to change clothes and get rid of the old ones or whatever, because there are witnesses who saw me earlier, wearing the same thing I was wearing when I was arrested.”

“That sounds good,” I say tentatively.

“Maybe. Sam thinks that if we bring in an expert to testify about that, then he can argue that I went upstairs and found her already dead. And that the blood came from me … touching her. And walking through the blood that was already on the floor.” He sinks onto the couch heavily, apparently wrung out by this last detail. I sit down next to him, give his shoulder a gentle squeeze.

“And you don’t remember any of that?”

“No.”

I think about it, try to picture it. “Do you think that’s possible? No matter how out of it you were, if you’d seen that there was something wrong—if you’d seen that she was
bleeding
—you would’ve done something, wouldn’t you?”

“That’s not … that’s not Sam’s theory. Not that I went up there and saw that she was dead and then went back downstairs to sleep on the couch. He thinks that maybe I went upstairs to leave the little toy for her to find in the morning—peace offering kind of thing, which I’m sure is what I must’ve been thinking when I bought it—and that it was dark, and I just thought she was sleeping.

“That was the other thing. Her blood—it turns out it was on my face, too, near my mouth. Like I might have kissed her. Like I might’ve gone up there in the dark, drunk off my ass, and kissed her good night without realizing she was dead.” He pauses, closes his eyes for a few seconds. “And the thing is, I so would’ve done that—I was always up later than she was, and I don’t know how many times I’ve given her a kiss while she was asleep. But the idea that she was
dead
, and I didn’t realize it because I was drunk and she was … she was still
warm
…”

His voice breaks, and I watch him struggle to get himself under control. He’s slumped down so much that when I put my arm around him, I actually have to lean down to press my lips to the top of his head.

“It’s horrible,” I say after a moment. “Really, really horrible. But it’s in your favor, don’t you think, as far as the defense goes? Both this and the detail about the blood spatter being wrong?”

He takes a minute to answer. He’s deep in his own head, but he pulls himself back to the conversation. “I don’t know. It all depends on the jury, you know? They’re going to see pictures of me with her blood on my hands—literal
blood
on my literal
hands
. That’s going to make a pretty strong impression.”

I nod, make a small noise of acknowledgment. I don’t know why it hasn’t occurred to me before now that the important task here is to plot a believable story. Not to make up something untrue, but to create a possible truth as vivid and as convincing as the one the prosecutor will be spinning.

I murmur softly, reach out to stroke his hair. When I speak, it sounds abrupt and loud in the quiet room. “Did you know that Chloe was there that night?” I ask.

He looks at me, nodding. He knows what I mean. “Yeah. Kathy mentioned it in her statement.” He stands and walks to the table, begins shuffling through the papers there. “You think she killed Bettina?”

I want to be careful here. “I don’t know. What do you think?”

He laughs humorlessly. “Fuck if I know. As far as we know, there were only three of us there that night—me, Kathy, and Chloe. If you’d asked me a couple weeks ago which one of us was most likely to
kill
somebody, I would’ve said none of us.”

He finds the statement he’s been looking for and skims it quickly. “Kathy says that Chloe came over to congratulate us on the engagement. I guess she would’ve heard about it from Joe, if she was there when I called from the restaurant.”

“What else does she say?”

“Just that the three of them were there for a couple of hours, packing up Bettina’s things, and that Chloe was still there when she left around eleven-forty-five.”

“And did the police question Chloe?”

“Yeah.” He flips through the papers, pulls out a different one. “She says the same thing, more or less. She says that she didn’t stay much longer. She left ten or fifteen minutes after Kathy did, because Bettina was on her way to bed.”

I think about it. “That doesn’t sound right. I mean the part about Chloe coming over to say congratulations and then staying to help Bettina pack.”

Milo shrugs. “How do you mean? The two of them weren’t that close, but it’s not like it’s totally out of character. There’s that whole female-bonding, ‘rally around the wounded girl’ thing.”

“Okay, but think about what would’ve happened when Chloe got there. She would’ve found out not only that the engagement was off but that Bettina knew about Lia.”

Milo jerks his head up to look at me, and I hear him breathe in sharply. “God,” he says. “I didn’t think of that.”

“I’m just guessing here,” I say. “But I don’t think Bettina would have been happy to see Chloe. And Chloe would’ve been completely blindsided.”

Milo begins pacing again. He runs a hand through his hair. “Yeah,” he says. “Shit.”

“They would’ve argued about it, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, probably. Although I know Kathy wouldn’t have left the two of them alone together if they were still fighting by then.”

“Does Kathy’s statement … is any of that in there?”

He shakes his head. “But by the time the police talked to her, I’d already been arrested, and everyone seemed to think it was pretty clear-cut that I did it.”

I sigh. “Well, what do you think? Do you think Chloe’s in love with you? Did she see Bettina as a rival?”

“God, Mom, I don’t know.” He sounds exasperated.

“Well, think about it. We’ve got to figure this out.”

“Right,” he says. His voice is getting louder. He’s angry and scared and looking for somewhere to put it. “Because you’re the detective who’s going to blow this case wide open.”

“Put it away, okay?” I say. That’s what we used to say when the kids used a word we didn’t want to hear or a tone of voice we didn’t like.
Put it away, please
. I take a breath, let it out.

He pauses for a moment, closes his eyes, takes a breath. “She definitely wanted us to be together way back at the beginning, but once she and Joe got together, I thought she was over it.” He shrugs. “I don’t really know her that well. Honestly, except for the part where she’s my best friend’s girlfriend, I don’t spend a lot of time with her.”

“She’s not just your best friend’s girlfriend,” I say, practically spitting out the words. “She’s the mother of your child, and you have to deal with that, whether you like it or not.” I hadn’t realized I was so angry about this.

He stares at me with a hard expression. This is possibly the first time since I’ve been here that I haven’t been on my best behavior with him. How long did I think it could last?

After a long moment, Milo asks, “Why are you even here?” He doesn’t sound angry. Just tired.

The question feels coded, like there’s a trick answer involved and I’ll never be able to puzzle out the right thing to say. “Because I love you. And you’re in trouble, and I want to help.” It sounds hollow, like I’m reading from a script.

Milo gathers his papers from the table and starts to walk toward the door.

“Wait,” I say. “Stop.” My chest tightens, and I’m afraid I might start crying. For four years I’ve wanted this,
four years
of knowing my son only through gossip magazines and tabloid Web sites. And now I’m here and I’m working so hard to screw it up.

He stops and turns to look at me. “What? What do you want to say?”

“I’m sorry.” My voice is thick and ugly, about to crack open. I fill the words with as much emotion as I can, all my remorse and contrition and fear of losing him. “I’m so sorry. For everything.”

Milo smiles a little, but not happily. “Yeah, you’re sorry for everything. That’s a nice way to cover your bases without thinking about whether you need to be sorry for anything specific.”

I don’t know what to say. Am I supposed to come up with an itemized list of everything I’ve done wrong in twenty-seven years? I’ll do it; I’d be happy to. If he’ll just give me the time. “That’s not true,” I say. “Not at all. I’m sorry for so many specific things. I’m sorry for the time when I—”

“If you say you’re sorry for that time when I was in high school and you were on a book tour and your flight got canceled and you missed my concert, I will fucking punch a hole in the wall.”

I freeze. So much fury in his voice. And yes, that was the story I was going to tell.