The Nobodies Album (30 page)

But whether it has to do with strength or weakness or fate or dumb luck, he’s here, and he’s the only one left who can say it. He’s
here
.

He’s here. He would have gone with them if he could, but that isn’t the way it ended. The day they went away was like a birth and a death all at once.

There are some stories no one wants to hear.

Chapter Sixteen

After a couple of hours have passed, time enough for Milo to cool down and for me to shatter and rebuild everything I know about him, I go looking for him.

I find him downstairs, watching a movie in a cozy, denlike room I haven’t been in yet. When he sees me in the doorway, he picks up a remote and pauses the action on the screen, leaving a frozen image of a kid swinging a baseball bat.

“Hi,” I say.

“Hi.”

I venture farther into the room, sit down on the opposite end of the couch. Neither of us says anything for a minute.

“You know,” I say softly, “the other day I heard the song ‘Traitor in the Backseat’ for the first time. I thought I knew all your music, but I’d never heard that one.” I reach out tentatively, put a hand on the back of his head. Ruffle his hair gently, like I used to do when he was little. “I loved it.”

He doesn’t answer, just watches me. He looks wary.

“I really liked the way you wrote about the sibling relationship. The sort of paradox that they annoy each other all the time, but they’re connected in a way that no one else quite gets.” I’m not sure I’ve ever talked to him this way about his work. Like I’m thinking about it and not just saying nice things because he’s my son. “And all those gorgeous details, about seeing the ocean on the other side of the guardrail and the kids making fun of someone they’d seen, the guy who had a funny-looking tan.” I smile a little bit, meeting his eyes. “Just really evocative. Made me cry, almost.”

He nods. He looks down at his hands resting in his lap, but I can see he’s pleased. “Thank you,” he says.

“I think that might be the only song I’ve heard where you were really clearly writing about Rosemary. Are there others?”

He shrugs. “Not really. There’s a line about home movies in ‘Every Other Day’ where I was thinking about her.”

“Right.” I nod and think for a minute before I quote the line: “‘Under the sprinkler, in an endless ring / Never get older, never miss a thing.’”

Milo nods.

“And I always thought that ‘Life as We Know It’ was about Daddy, at least partly. Am I right about that?”

“Yeah. Not all of it, just that part about learning to drive. I remember when I was really little, like five or six, I used to think about how cool it would be when I was finally old enough to drive a car. And the way I always pictured it, I figured he’d be the one to teach me.”

I smile. “He probably would have handled it better. I was not the world’s calmest driving instructor.”

Milo smiles, too. “I was so mad that time you grabbed the wheel in the CVS parking lot. You almost swerved us into a light pole. I was
not
going to hit that old lady.”

“Probably not. I might have been overreacting. I wasn’t used to judging distances from the passenger’s side instead of the driver’s side, you know? From where I was sitting, it looked like it was going to be close.” I think for a minute, not quite trusting my own memory. “Did you actually give her the finger? After the two of us practically ran her over?”

He looks sheepish. “Yeah, that wasn’t my finest moment. I was mad at you, and kind of freaked out, because she
was
a little closer than I thought she was. But, you know. Not really her fault.”

I smile. “No.” I look back at the TV screen, the boy’s blue cap, the blur of the bat in motion. “It’s really nice that you’ve honored them that way. Daddy and Rosemary. I think that if they could hear the songs, they’d like them.”

He shrugs, deflecting the compliment. “Maybe. Aren’t you going to say that they probably
can
hear them somewhere?”

I shake my head. “No. I’d like to believe that’s true, but I don’t really think it is.”

“You’ve written about them, too,” he says. “I mean, obviously.”

He looks tentative, nothing close to angry, but I answer carefully. “Yes,” I say. “All the time. Even when I don’t mean to.”

He nods. “Even when you think you’re doing something else completely.”

The upholstery of the couch is soft, something like suede but more durable. I run a finger over the cushion in a vague circular pattern.

“Clearly ‘sorry’ isn’t the way to go here,” I say. “There are a lot of things that I wish I’d done differently, but I love you more than anything else in the world, and I really, really hope that I can get back into your life, in whatever way you’re comfortable with.”

The words sound clumsy to me, and I regret the ‘anything else in the world’ part as soon as I say it, afraid he’ll take it to mean that if Mitch and Rosemary were still in the world, I might love them more. But when I look at him, he’s smiling faintly, looking both annoyed and amused.

“Jeez, Mom,” he says. “I’m
right here
, sitting two feet away from you. In what way are you not back in my life?”

For a moment I can’t say anything. I’m grateful and overwhelmed, because it’s so generous and so understated and just so very
Milo
. And he can see that I’m trying not to lose it, that I’m moved almost to tears by something he said to make me
laugh
, and he rolls his eyes in a way that I know is affectionate. And then I really am laughing along with him.

“I kind of thought that was obvious,” he says drily. “I mean, yeah, it’s not like everything’s all rainbows and puppy dogs, but if I were going to kick you out, I’d have done it before now.”

“Thank you,” I say, my voice still choked. I lean over and give him a kiss on the forehead.

“For not kicking you out.” His tone is sardonic. “No problem. That would make a hell of a Mother’s Day card: ‘You raised me and nurtured me, and in return I won’t send you away to sleep on a pile of garbage in the alley.’”

I laugh again and finally manage to pull myself together, wiping my eyes with a finger. I’m not sure I deserve it, and I’m not sure I won’t screw it up, but for the moment I feel lucky. Blessed.

“Have you eaten?” Milo asks. “I’m starving all of a sudden.”

He turns off the TV, the little boy on the screen still a moment away from hitting the ball or missing it, and together we walk to the kitchen to find some dinner.

•  •  •

When Milo was a little boy, we once had a discussion about the difference between DNA and the soul. I’d inadvertently, at different times, defined each of them as “the thing that makes you
you.”
I don’t imagine that my answer was particularly enlightening; it can be both alarming and humbling to realize the scope of your child’s faith in your ability to explain the world to him. As out of touch as I was with the things I’d learned when I was young, I struggled with half-forgotten phrases about dust and breath, coils and nucleotides. I told him that it would all become clearer when he was older.

But here on the other side of “when you’re older,” we sometimes draw the lines
too
clearly. If I were to ask Milo now, he’d probably say what I said then: that the soul and DNA are completely separate ideas, and that they have nothing to do with each other.

Of the many gifts parents receive from their children, this is one of the best: the way they give us a new way of seeing, even after they’ve lost the thread of it themselves. Left to my own devices, I would never have dreamed up the idea of an album of songs that don’t exist. I wouldn’t have remembered that whatever we call it, there’s a part of us that’s essential, eternal, connecting us forward through generations and Elysium. Making us the people we are.

•  •  •

Milo and I talk over dinner and for a long time afterward, far-ranging conversations that move from trips Milo took with Bettina to the politics of the music industry to the temperament of the dog we used to have. We don’t talk about the details of the murder case or the books I’ve written or anything else that might possibly unbalance us. I don’t want to avoid the hard topics forever, but for tonight I’m giving us a break.

Eventually, though, when the pace of the discussion has become comfortable and soft, I do allow myself this: “So. Tell me about Lia.”

We’ve moved from the kitchen to the living room, or whatever it might be called—the room where Roland keeps his Grammy and his coffee-table books. We’re sitting on sofas that are less comfortable but more artful than the ones in the video room.

Milo gives me a look that I know well. It means that he doesn’t mind my asking, but he’s not going to discuss it in any great depth.

“Lia’s nice,” he says, deliberately noncommittal. “I like Lia.”

I smile. “Okay,” I say. “I won’t push on this one.”

He shrugs. “It’s not any … it’s just what it is.”

“Right.” I watch him. I’m not going to insist that he elaborate, but I’m also not going to make things easier by changing the subject.

“She’s a beautiful kid,” he says, after a minute or two of silence. “Sometimes I see her, and I’m just amazed to think that I had anything to do with that. So if by some chance I
don’t
end up going to prison for the rest of my life, then yeah—I’d like to get to know her and maybe become something other than Uncle Milo. But I think it should be obvious that now’s really not the time.”

I nod and look away. I’m embarrassed that I brought it up, embarrassed that I made it seem, even for a minute, that I’ve forgotten how uncertain Milo’s future is. What I really want to know, I suppose, is not what’s going to happen next, but why Milo made the decisions he did about Lia, why he didn’t step in and become her father right from the start. Or no—if I’m being honest, what I really want to know is whether or not we can reduce it to simple enough terms that I can take the blame. In some perverse way, I want him to say that it’s because Chloe got pregnant so soon after he broke away from me and he didn’t want to be a part of any kind of family. Or because I gave him the idea that raising children was a burden. Or because the loss of Rosemary hurt too much for him to consider loving another little girl.

But nothing is simple, and it’s
not
always about me. And Milo’s right that there are more urgent matters to consider at the moment.

I get up to use the bathroom, and on my way back I stop to look at the table of photographs in the front hall. I’m drawn again to the one of Milo and Bettina sitting by the water in the midst of that strange, artistic debris. I look at Bettina, laughing and holding Milo’s hand, leaning her head against his shoulder. It’s a loss I’m just beginning to understand, what might have been if I’d known this woman Milo’s holding on to so tenderly. This woman who loved him as much as I do.

I look over the background setting again, thinking I should ask Milo where they were that day. Water and open pipes, columns and piles of rocks stacked haphazardly. And then I notice something I didn’t see before about the heavy slabs of marble and granite: some of them are carved. Carved like gravestones.

“Milo,” I call. My voice is sharp. I carry the picture back to where he’s sitting. “Where was this taken?”

He looks at it and sits up straighter. “The Wave Organ,” he says.

“What’s that?”

He doesn’t answer. He’s staring at the photo. “This is it. This is where I went that night.”

“What is it?” I ask again.

“It’s …” He lifts his eyes to look at me. His expression is urgent, almost wild. “It’s on the bay, near the Exploratorium. It’s this big sculpture that’s supposed to make music when the water hits the pipes at high tide. It’s, like, environmental art, or whatever they call it. It’s all made out of gravestones, from when they relocated some cemetery from the Gold Rush or something.”

“And you went there with Bettina. Well, obviously.”

“Yeah, once.”

“Was it … an important day? Like a first date or something?”

He doesn’t quite roll his eyes. “God, Mom. I don’t think I’ve ever been on a
date
in my life.” He looks at the picture again, and his face softens. “But yeah. I just … it was the day I knew I loved her.”

“And that’s where you went on the night of the murder? The place where you fell down and hit your head, after Kathy chased you away from the house?”

He nods. “Not sure how I ended up there. I wasn’t planning to go there specifically—I was just driving around aimlessly. But it’s not far from the house, and I guess I just saw the turn for the yacht club, which is how you get there …”

“Do you remember anything else?”

“Maybe. Let me think.” He studies the picture. “I was sitting right there,” he says, pointing to a chunky marble platform. “And I had my phone out, and I just kept pressing redial. And I was looking at the water, which was really rough, crashing against the rocks. It must have been close to high tide, because I remember hearing these noises from the pipes sometimes, kind of a soft howling … or no, that’s saying it too strongly. More like the inside of a seashell, but louder.”

I nod, wait for him to go on.

“And, God. I just felt like my life was over. Like if I couldn’t get Bettina back, then what was it all for?” He lifts a hand to scratch the back of his neck. “I wasn’t thinking about jumping into the water—really, it was nothing like that—but I remember looking at the bay and wondering how it would feel to just fall into it and let it pull me away. Wondering how far away it would take me.”