The Nobodies Album (15 page)

I come to the corner of Arguello and Anza and turn left. There are species of trees here that I’ve never seen on the East Coast, some of them knobby and stunted, others blooming in big green globes, almost like topiary. I’m going deeper into what seems to be an entirely residential neighborhood, and I like the solitude. For a few more minutes I can be outside my life, not the mother of an accused murderer, not a writer wasting time on a project no one seems to understand. Just a lady with sunglasses, walking through a landscape designed by Dr. Seuss.

Up ahead there’s a corner where I’ve seen several cars turn in the last few minutes, and I strain to see the street sign. Yes, it’s the right one. I turn into a tiny cul-de-sac, maybe four houses on each side, which dead-ends at a strange little building with a domed roof and a crowd of people outside. The building is round, ornate, neoclassical—not quite a church, not quite a museum—and it’s an odd sight in the middle of this ordinary neighborhood.

I walk closer, and the crowd outside comes into sharper focus. It’s a collection of news crews, photographers, and curious onlookers, similar to the one gathered outside Roland’s house yesterday.

Then two things happen simultaneously: I see the sign on the gate that says
COLUMBARIUM OF SAN FRANCISCO
, and a man comes out of the building carrying two cases of soda.

He sets them down before the wriggling mass. “Mrs. Moffett asked me to bring these out,” he says. “She said she’ll be happy to talk to you afterward.”

And that’s when I know I’ve come to the right place. I’ve found Bettina’s funeral.

From the Jacket Copy for
TROPOSPHERIC SCATTER
By Octavia Frost

(Farraday Books, 1999)

I
n 1964, engineer Howard Liles moves his wife, Marie, and ten-year-old son, Tom, to the far edge of the earth: Kotzebue, Alaska, thirty-three miles above the Arctic Circle, where Howard has a job working on the military’s White Alice Communications System. Shortly after they arrive, in the midst of adjusting to their desolate new home, Marie makes a startling discovery while doing some charity work for her church: she finds a six-year-old girl, raised in terrible neglect and squalor and now orphaned. The family takes this nearly feral child into their home and raises her, learning from her as much as she learns from them.

From its captivating beginning to its tragic and shattering climax,
Tropospheric Scatter
is a novel you won’t soon forget.

Excerpt from
TROPOSPHERIC SCATTER
By Octavia Frost
ORIGINAL ENDING

They were exactly the wrong two to die. Nights, after the accident—that was the thought Howard kept returning to. Any other combination, even for him and Marie to lose both children, or for Tom and Beecy to have been orphaned, would have been better than this gutted fish of a family that flopped grotesquely, slowly suffocating on the pier. It was a horrible thing to think, and worse probably because Tom was his child by birth when Beecy hadn’t been, but Howard found some grim comfort in the stark defiance of it. So many of the facts of his life now involved confinement—the close quarters of the cabin, the brutal wind that kept everyone indoors, the days without sunlight, the bed that seemed somehow smaller without Marie in it. He’d be damned if he couldn’t roam where he wanted in the terrain of his own mind.

The two of them barely spoke in the days and weeks after it happened, though perhaps it had less to do with their feelings about each other than with the way they both seemed to have settled out of human society like debris sinking to the bottom of a water glass. Howard worked and came home and spent his evenings smoking at the table, and Tom lay curled on his bed for hours at a time, sometimes from the moment he came home from school until it was time to turn around and go there again. Howard kept his distance and left food out, as he might for an injured animal. He knew Tom was hurting, and that it was his job to help in whatever way he could, but he didn’t even trust himself to open his mouth, knowing the things that might come out. Howard could examine the events of that terrible day objectively, call it an accident to anyone who asked, but when he looked at Tom, slumped at the table with his schoolbooks, he would repeat to himself “Your fault your fault your fault” until the words became nonsense and the rhythm began to soothe him.

The bottomlessness of his anger surprised him. Tom was his son, and he loved him; that wasn’t in question. But it seemed, all of a sudden, irrelevant. He could picture Tom as a baby, Tom as a toddler, Tom on his first day of school, and listen for that automatic note of tenderness, but it was far-off now, muffled. It was as if there were static in his chest, white noise keeping him from picking up signals that should have been clear. Had it always been there, that crackle of interference? He no longer had any idea.

•  •  •

Three days after the bodies had been recovered, when the men went to dig the graves, Howard went with them. It was much the same as it had been when he joined in after Wally Forman died—clearing the snow, building a fire to soften the earth. The thermos of coffee passed from hand to hand, the quiet talk of fishing, the backache that told you you were doing something worthwhile.

Howard was glad, just then, to be here in Alaska, glad he could do something so tangible for his two lost girls. When his turn came, he climbed into the hole, and with each shovel of frozen dirt, he thought, This is for you, and this is for you, and this is for you.

The funeral was well attended, despite the snow that drifted up to the church’s bell tower, and the same newspaper reporter who had come to Kotzebue after they’d found Beecy showed up now to put an ending to the story. Within a few weeks, Peller’s Trading Post was selling copies of the
Anchorage Daily News
with a handwritten note posted on the wall above the pile: “Beecy’s story inside.” Howard, in the store to buy powdered milk and bear lard, walked right by without even a sideways glance, but someone (with what kind of intentions, Howard wasn’t sure) left a copy in his locker at work. And that night, after Tom was in bed, Howard sat at the table with a glass of whiskey and opened to the right page.

“The Short, Strange Life of Beecy Liles” was the title. As if she were a character in a film. Howard tapped his fingers and took a drink.

“The child that newspapers dubbed ‘the Kotzebue Closet Girl’ was christened Elizabeth Ann Liles by her adoptive parents, who intended to call her Betsy. But the name that will be engraved on her tombstone is the one that she gave herself when, after nearly two years of patience and intense work on the part of her new parents, she attempted to say her name for the first time. On that day, transplanted to a loving home, with the ordeals of her early life long behind her, she looked into Marie Liles’s face and said, ‘Beecy.’”

Howard’s eyes stung, though the word that came into his mind was “manipulative.” It was the same as it had been before, the first time that the shape of their family had caught the newspapers’ attention: hours plucked from his life at random and placed within a framework they hadn’t seemed to have at the time. It was still his life, recognizable and even capable of provoking emotion, but it was missing some kind of essential texture.

He skimmed the next part, a repeat of all the same details that had been published before. People were in love with this story; why, Howard didn’t quite know.

“Everyone in this small town knew Beecy’s father, Malcolm Barnett; as the owner of one of Kotzebue’s two general stores, he was familiar to everyone. But no one seemed to know much about him. He was a quiet man, and a bit of a recluse. Townspeople would sometimes make bets with each other about how many words they’d be able to get him to speak during a visit to his store. Rumor goes, the record was eight. People knew that he’d married an Eskimo girl some years before, and that she’d died soon after. What they didn’t know, what nobody knew, was that she’d died giving birth to their only child, a daughter. When Mr. Barnett died in 1965, with no apparent heirs or family nearby, several ladies from St. George’s in the Arctic Episcopal Church volunteered to clean out his cabin. They were shocked by what they found. The squat two-room building contained a level of filth few of those good women had ever seen. And it contained something else, as Marie Liles found out when she opened the door of a closet in Mr. Barnett’s bedroom: a six-year-old girl, naked and shivering, lying on a pile of rags on the floor.”

Howard flicked the paper with his forefinger in a childish, vaguely hostile gesture. He hated seeing this hashed out yet again. It gave him the feeling that even if Beecy had lived to be a hundred, she still would’ve been known as the Closet Girl of Kotzebue. And of course he never liked the way they insisted on referring to that crazy bastard as Beecy’s father. Howard’s ideas of heaven were vague, but he did believe that one day he would be reunited with the people he’d loved. He wondered if Marie and Beecy were still together in that place or state of being or whatever it might be, or if Beecy had been returned to her natural mother and father. It was a gray area, certainly not something that any priest he’d ever listened to had addressed in a sermon, but it killed him to think of Beecy’s soul being given over to the safekeeping of the two people who had abandoned her, one through death and one through cruelty and neglect.

He read on, because it was there and because it was about his child, but when he came to the paragraph about the accident, he felt the need to physically avert his eyes. The idiocy of the impulse annoyed him. He knew what had happened, didn’t he? There was nothing new in those words, no reason he should feel like he couldn’t catch his breath. So he pushed himself to look down for seconds at a time, absorbing a phrase or two at each go.

“An ice bridge had formed across the surface of the river, and Tom urged his sister to climb out onto the sparkling surface …”

Take a break. Look up at the wooden slats of the ceiling, pick a knothole to focus on, gulp the air.

“… terrible crack … Tom ran for help …” Press a tender place where he’d accidentally hammered his thumbnail a couple weeks before.

“Marie Liles, doing the washing, heard her son’s shouts … rushed together toward the riverbank … jumped in after her daughter.”

Close your eyes. Breathe in, breathe out.

“Helpless and horrified … frozen … trapped under the lip of the ice.”

Even though two people had died that day, the article barely mentioned Marie at all. It was a reversal of the way most people seemed to want to talk about it, Howard thought, at least when they were addressing him directly. He’d noticed that his friends and neighbors and coworkers seemed to expect him to divide his grief in two. And if they saw fit to offer their comfort, they expected that in return Howard would tuck one half of it away out of sight.

Losing Marie was a panic and a weight. It was a hole so deep that he wasn’t sure he’d ever climb out of it. But at least it was something everyone seemed to understand. Pete Johansen took him aside one day at work and told Howard that after Gloria died, he went a full year without eating a hot meal. And Marty Willoughby over at the Kalakaket Creek site, whom Howard had never met but had spoken to over the radio often enough, told him that he still had dreams about a girlfriend who’d died when they were in high school. Even people who’d barely known Marie felt comfortable grabbing Howard’s arm and telling him she’d been a saint. That was the word he heard over and over again, and he appreciated the kindness of it, though he didn’t think of Marie as having the sort of bland goodness, the pale porcelain virtue, he’d always imagined when he heard that word.

But almost no one knew what to say about Beecy. There were a couple of men Howard knew who’d lost children (and one of them a cripple), but none of those guys seemed to draw any line between their own experiences and the airless, choking feeling Howard got whenever he pictured Beecy’s face. And maybe it was better they didn’t say anything; the ones who did couldn’t have gotten it more wrong if they’d tried. After the funeral, when the men moved from the church over to the Royal, Sheet Jennings clapped Howard on the back and said, “It’s better this way. There was no way she was going to grow up to be somebody’s wife. You and Marie would’ve been taking care of her till the day you died.” And not too much later, on his way back from the toilet, he overheard Don Mizulski, drunk and shushed quickly but not soon enough, say, “I used to look at that girl and think, they better not let her out after she starts bleeding, or they’re gonna end up with a whole litter just like her.”

It was hard for Howard to put into words what he had seen in Beecy that made her so dear to him. She was his daughter, certainly, almost from the first moment she entered their home, but she was also his most precious responsibility. He understood her, and she was a child he knew not everybody would understand. She wasn’t wild—that was the thing he kept coming back to. Every single article that had been written about her had used that word or a variation of it: feral, savage, like an animal. But putting her face in a plate of food because she didn’t know any other way to eat, soiling herself because no one had taught her any different—that didn’t make her an animal. It was the very fact of her humanity that caught in Howard’s chest. She was a child, a hurt, frightened little girl. And Howard’s only job was to show her that people in this world had the capacity to be kind.

It was Howard’s hands she’d been holding the first time she crossed the floor on two legs, Howard’s lap she was sitting on the first time she looked at the fire and said “Fa.” Of course, Tom had done those same things, back in his own infancy, back in Minnesota, and Howard had been as proud as any father. But when you buy a car new off the lot, it’s no surprise that it runs when you turn the key. The unexpected thing, the miraculous thing, is when a car that’s been shattered in a crash, that’s been left in the rain to rust for years at a time, can be coaxed to growl to a start and slowly begin rolling down the street.

•  •  •

Time passed, and Howard waited for the thaw. Walking the mud road to the base, slapping at mosquitoes, he looked at the landscape around him and tried to find some wonder in it. He remembered their first summer here, how thrilled they’d all been by the wildflowers and the racks of drying fish, the spectacle of a whale slaughter, the surprise of a bear cub eating blueberries from a bush. And later summers: Tom jumping from oil drums and Beecy laughing at husky puppies rolling in the dirt, Marie sitting outside the cabin after dinner, her hands empty for once, no basket of mending, no work to keep them busy. Now the world was melting again, and Howard wondered if the only thing he’d remember from this summer would be the shameful relief he felt whenever he arrived home to find his son wasn’t there.

Tom had found a girlfriend, which Howard couldn’t begrudge him, and he spent most of his time over at her house, where things were, presumably, less bleak. Tom’s life was going to keep going, even if Howard’s didn’t—a few more years and he’d be off to college or the army, a job in a less frozen locale, and eventually there would be marriage and children and days full to bursting. Howard knew that certainly a time would come when he would be sorry for the way he was behaving now, when he’d wish for the kind of connection with his son that he was all but murdering. The hell of it was, knowing it didn’t change a thing.