The Nobodies Album (4 page)

I look at the picture that all the papers are running, a shot taken a couple of months ago at an awards show. He’s wearing a bizarre velvet tuxedo, bottle green; it looks like it came from a thrift store, but it’s more likely that he paid some designer a ridiculous sum of money for it. His hair looks tangled and dirty—though again, I’m sure he went to a great deal of trouble to get it that way—and his jaw is stubbly. Bettina’s wearing a short beaded dress, meant to evoke the flapper era, and ripped black tights; her blond hair is done up in elaborate pin curls, and her makeup is heavy. She’s got both arms around Milo and is leaning her head against his arm, with a wild happy smile on her face. Milo isn’t smiling. He’s gazing down at Bettina with an intensity that would frighten the mother of any daughter. It may be an accident of timing, the expression lasting for only that split second when the photographer moved his finger. But he’s looking at her as if he couldn’t stop if he wanted to, as if the sheer act of watching her is the only thing that can sustain him. As if he’s afraid that if he looks away, even for a second, one of them might cease to exist.

Bettina didn’t deserve this
—that’s another statement her mother made at her little press party. I’ve always been wary of that idea—that any of us deserve anything, that we’re owed a particular outcome for our lives—but this is one of those black-and-white cases that wipes away the gray areas pretty neatly. Bettina Moffett did not deserve to have her cranium shattered, her blood spilled on her sheets. And Kathy Moffett—I will say this as someone who knows how it feels to lose a daughter—does not deserve what she’s been given, either.

I fold up the papers and stuff them under the seat in front of me. I also have a book I picked up at the airport, a novel written by a woman named Sara Ferdinand, who’s an old friend of mine from college. A onetime rival, really. She’s done very well; she’s won a lot of awards, but I’ve never really understood the appeal of her work. She writes stories like spindly wooden dolls with no clothes on them, stories that are often admired but, as far as I can tell, seldom loved. Her prose is like an empty room: bare, not a speck of dust, each sentence reduced down to its very essence. Emotion leached out with all the other debris. This book is called
The Dying Brain
, and there was a huge display of them at the airport newsstand. It’s just been released as a film, and the paperback has been given a makeover, celebrities on the cover as if you might actually find them inside. I don’t know why I chose today of all days to buy a book written by a colleague I have decidedly mixed feelings about, but it doesn’t surprise me that I don’t even want to read the first page. And so I’m here, in a metal box in the sky, trapped with my own thoughts.

One more thing about the newspaper articles: they include me as well. Each story has managed to squeeze in something like the following:
Frost is the son of best-selling author Octavia Frost, whose novel
Tropospheric Scatter
contains a scene in which a musician kills his wife
. (They do not mention that the scene in question—which has little bearing on the larger plot—is about an eighty-nine-year-old flautist who backs over his wife with his car.)

It’s not the first time since we’ve been apart that Milo and I have been discussed in the same flutter of newsprint. Articles about Pareidolia mention me only rarely; I imagine that the group’s target audience would be frightened by the very mention of books (not to mention mothers) and would skitter off to find a band with a less literary pedigree. But publicists and journalists working on my behalf never fail to bring up who my son is. And despite the troubles we’ve had, I always enjoy sharing print space with Milo. I imagine him, alerted to these articles by some digital clipping service, forced to read my name and gaze upon my image, however much he’d prefer not to. This is how we’ve kept up with each other in these past few years. I don’t think I’m the only one who’s been looking.

•  •  •

After half a day of travel, I arrive in a place where it’s still morning and bright as spring. Once I’m installed in my hotel room, tired and dazed, I turn on CNN to see what news may have broken during the few hours I was moving through the air. I find out immediately—it’s printed on the screen, I don’t even have to wait for the words to be spoken aloud—that Milo has been released on bail. It’s a relief, though perhaps it shouldn’t be. It changes nothing about the larger situation, but I’m glad to know that, for the moment anyway, he’s not being raped or threatened with a shank or whatever goes on in a prison inhabited by real criminals and not Hollywood actors, which is my only point of reference. The fact that he’s been released also implies a judgment about the severity of his crime: the police may still think my son is a murderer, but if they’re willing to let him walk the streets, then they must not think he’s the very worst kind of murderer. It’s a matter of degree that would have been too subtle for me to grasp twenty-four hours ago. Strange how reassuring I find it now.

Milo’s lawyer is on the screen, talking to the news anchor. His name is Samuel Zalakis, which I copy down onto the hotel-letterhead notepad next to the phone. I don’t know if Milo picked this man himself, but he seems like a good choice. He’s in his mid-fifties, sleek and well groomed, charismatic but not unctuous. He could perhaps be called fatherly, but only if your father had a taste for thousand-dollar ties and appeared comfortable speaking in front of fifty million people.

“At this point,” the anchorwoman asks, leaning forward, “it does not look likely that prosecutors will seek the death penalty, is that correct?”

A snake moves through my belly. Living in Massachusetts, where no one’s been executed since—when? the forties?—I hadn’t even thought of that.

“That’s right. The charge is first-degree murder without special circumstances, which in the state of California is punishable by twenty-five years to life.”

“And if, during the course of the investigation, the district attorney were to determine that there were special circumstances, such as lying in wait or mayhem, which we’ve seen before in high-profile murder cases …?”

“We don’t expect that to happen, but yes, it is possible that additional charges could be filed, which might affect the sentencing.”

I lie down across the bed, resting my cheek against the rough silk of the bedspread. My heart beats; I breathe in, I breathe out. I don’t know how I’m supposed to do this.

The show goes to commercial; I stretch for the remote and turn off the TV. I’m certain there will be more coverage, but I don’t want to see it right now. After a few moments, I force myself to sit up. I didn’t come all the way across the country to lie on a bed. I reach for my cell phone and call directory assistance to request the number of Zalakis’s firm.

“Zalakis, Sampson, and Dugger,” says the receptionist who answers.

“Hello,” I say. “I’m trying to reach Mr. Zalakis. I’m Milo Frost’s mother.”

I’m hoping for a shocked pause, perhaps even an expression of disbelief, but she’s a pro. “I’m sorry,” she says, “Mr. Zalakis isn’t available right now.” Of course not; I just saw him live on CNN. Did I think she was going to give me his private cell? “If you’d like to give me your name and number, I can take a message.”

I give her the information and hang up. I’ve got one more vague idea. In my purse I find the old address book I pulled from my desk this morning, and I look up the home number for Rana and Salima Khan, the parents of Milo’s bandmate Joe. I’ve known Joe for a long time. He and Milo go way back—junior high, at least. I can remember the two of them holed up in Milo’s bedroom, listening to music so loud the house shook. On more than one occasion, I went in to turn the music down and caught them with contraband they shouldn’t have had: a girly magazine, firecrackers, a joint. I remember the startled panic on their faces at my appearance, the rush to hide whatever they didn’t want me to see. This is how I imagine Milo reacting yesterday morning when the police stormed into his house.

Salima answers. The conversation is awkward—we haven’t spoken in probably ten years, and this isn’t the best week for getting in touch with old friends—but when I hang up, I have Joe’s number written on my hotel pad.

Joe spent quite a bit of time with us when he and Milo were teenagers. I was happy to have him there; with just me and Milo in the house, it was helpful to have someone else around to act as a buffer from time to time. He was a nice kid, smart and funny, more even-keeled than Milo ever was. I think he’ll be willing to talk to me, though I don’t know how much my absence from Milo’s life over the past four years will have influenced his ideas about me.

He answers on the second ring. “Hello?” he says, like it’s a question. Now that everyone knows who’s on the phone before the first words are spoken, a call from an unfamiliar number is cause for suspicion.

“Hi, Joe,” I say. I’m nervous suddenly. “It’s Octavia Frost.”

“Mrs. Frost,” he says. I tried for a while, I remember, to get him to call me by my first name, but it never took. “I was wondering if I’d hear from you.”

“You were?”

“Well, yeah, of course. I figured, with all this going on, you might be trying to get in touch with Milo.”

“Have you seen him?” I say. “Since he … was released?”

“No, not yet, but I talked to him. He sounds, you know, okay.”

“Where is he staying? Not back in the house?”

“No, the police are still there. He’s going to stay with Roland Nysmith for a few days.”

This takes me by surprise. Roland Nysmith, the venerable rock god from the seventies band The Misters, has long been a hero of Milo’s. I had read that they’d become friends, but I had no idea they were close enough for Milo to call in a favor like this. It’s a brilliant move, actually, probably the work of some PR damage-control guru. Roland Nysmith’s one of the few celebrities who’s managed the curious transformation from tight-trousered rebel to elder statesman without stumbling into the murk of self-parody, and his support lends an air of respectability to the whole sordid mess.

“I see,” I say. “Can you give me the number there, or maybe even take me to see him?”

“Oh, you’re here? In San Francisco?”

“I flew in this morning.”

“That’s funny. When I talked to Milo a little while ago, I asked if he’d talked to you, and he said no. I said, ‘I bet she’ll want to see you,’ and he said he thought you’d probably want to watch everything unfold from a distance. He said he thought you’d just want to know how the story ends.”

I don’t say anything. It’s just a bratty throwaway comment, typical Milo, but it hurts me.

“Oh, God,” says Joe. “I can’t believe I said that. I’m sorry, I haven’t gotten any sleep in, like, thirty hours.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “Well, I’m here and I would like to see my son. Do you have his phone number?”

“Well, here’s the thing. He told me that if you did get in touch with me, I shouldn’t tell you anything.”

“Oh,” I say. I’m not surprised, but I still feel a buried thrum of grief.

“But now that you’re actually here,” Joe continues, “maybe he’ll feel differently. Let me give him a call, and I’ll get back to you in a few minutes, okay?”

I thank him and we hang up. The last time I saw Milo, he was getting ready to board a plane. He’d been home for Christmas, and I saw him off at the airport. Pareidolia’s debut album had just come out, and the first single was getting a lot of airplay. I was in a professional honeymoon mood myself, having written the last pages of my novel
Carpathia
the day before he’d arrived. We’d had a lovely visit; there had been a sense of things about to happen. I wish now that I’d gone into the airport with him—he’d had some time to kill, which turned out to be a crucial factor in everything that followed—but I had some errands to run, so I dropped him at the curb. We hugged good-bye, and I kissed him on the cheek. Neither of us knew, not yet, that by the time Milo stepped off that plane, our relationship would have changed irrevocably.

The phone rings. “Hi, Joe,” I say.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Frost. He said no.”

All at once I feel nothing but angry.
The little shit
, I think, then immediately feel guilty, as if I’d said it to his face. I suppose I have to admire his backbone. Why turn this into a melodrama? The tearful mother pressing her hand to the jailhouse glass, the wayward son ashamed to meet her eyes … no. Not us. I’ll leave, I’ll fly back tonight. The next time I come, it will be because he asked me to.

“Mrs. Frost?” says Joe. “Are you okay?”

“Fine,” I say, my voice tight.

“Where are you staying?” he asks.

I tell him.

“Do you want to meet for coffee or something? I could be there in a half hour.”

•  •  •

There was a girl I knew, growing up, named Lisette Freyn. She was a quiet, bending willow of a girl; she smiled a lot, but she never seemed to have any friends. She left home at fifteen, and the story was that she’d run away to become a groupie, following rock bands on the road. To me, naive and still comfortable in the straitjacket of home life, it was like hearing she’d run away to become a peacock. To be part of a crowd every night, losing your edges in a thudding gush of music; to lick the sweat from the faces of men whose albums you’d bought with your birthday money … I couldn’t imagine anyone I knew living such a life.

A few years later, in the mid-seventies, when Bramble Wine came out with their song “Lisette Spins,” we all knew (or thought we knew) that it was about her. A girl with “burning eyes and a firefly smile,” a girl “young enough to spin across the room, old enough to land here on the bed.” A girl who “whispers her mama’s name when she thinks I can’t hear.” The song comes on every so often on the oldies station, and for a long time, before the Internet made ignorance quaint and unnecessary, I would think about her and try to imagine what had become of her.

She died of an overdose. Or she married a chiropractor.

She hates the song, she calls herself Lisa now, her kids don’t even know.

It’s a story she tells at parties. Or she never talks about it but she makes sure the hostess points her out to every guest.