The Nobodies Album (16 page)

In early June, the sun rose and didn’t set. Through the nightless weeks that preceded Tom’s fifteenth birthday, Howard tried to imagine a way he might make things different. He suggested to Tom that they might want to take a trip—they could go camping, or even fly into Anchorage—but Tom wanted to stay in town and go to the July Fourth fair, just as they’d always done, though Howard was sure they were both thinking that there could be no more “just as they’d always done,” not really, not ever.

He had meant to go down to Peller’s to see about ordering Tom a camera, but the time got away from him, and so he ended up buying him a set of binoculars from the shelf above the counter. They were nice ones, and they’d be good for hunting or for hiking and climbing. A million uses a boy might have for binoculars here—wasn’t that exactly the reason they’d packed up their house and moved to this end of the earth in the first place?

When Howard woke on the morning of the Fourth, early as he always did in the summer here, in spite of the thick blankets Marie always hung on the windows, he lay in bed and smoked for a while before getting up.
His birth day
, he thought, testing himself, remembering the smoky waiting room and the tiny weight in his hands, Marie’s happiness and indeed his own. He remembered the sudden shyness he felt, walking into his wife’s hospital room with a bouquet of irises, and he remembered his mother spontaneously singing “Yankee Doodle Dandy” when he called to tell her the news. He remembered looking at the clock and savoring the phrase “three hours old” as he held a bottle to the baby’s lips and watched him drink for only the second time in his life. Howard focused on these things, pushing out everything else, and he was rewarded with a small piercing feeling, but it was distant and bewildering, like hearing a few lines of a language you’d studied in high school.

He let Tom sleep late, then woke him with pancakes like Marie used to do. The line between nostalgia and playacting hadn’t quite solidified in Howard’s mind yet, but he guessed this would be something Tom would miss if he didn’t do it. They ate together, and Howard presented the binoculars, which Tom seemed pleased with, and then they set off for town.

They walked toward the water and Front Street, where the crowds had gathered. In the distance was the otherworldly silhouette of the White Alice site: the Martian-city radar domes and the billboard antennas that looked for all the world like the drive-in movie screens that had thrown patterns of light on the twining bodies of Howard and Marie in the days before they were married. He wondered who was working today at the site. Strange to think that as he and his son walked in silence, there were words flying through the air above their heads: messages and signals, invisible, bouncing off the lowest level of sky. People throwing their voices hundreds of miles, a modern miracle dressed down with secular words like “communication” and “defense.”

“You gonna join the blubber-eating contest this year?” Howard asked Tom. Trying. “They say it tastes like coconut.”

Tom looked at his father with half a smile. “I will if you do the blanket toss.”

Howard smiled, too, or something like it. It had been a joke last year, how Howard was the only one who wouldn’t take a turn being thrown up and down on the circle of sealskin. Well, that was something, he thought, a way of stepping out of the trap of “the way things used to be.”

“You got it,” he said.

They could hear the sound of drumming now, and Howard saw a banner strung up outside the Royal: “Happy Independence Day! 10 Years of Statehood: 1959–1969!” A makeshift stage had been set up down by the water, and the beautiful-baby contest was in full swing. Later there would be more competitions—sled dogs pulling weighted carts, men kicking fur balls hung above their heads, children drawing lengths of string into their mouths without using their hands. Already young women were lining up in parkas and fur boots to compete for the title of Miss Arctic Circle. It was a warm day, maybe seventy-five degrees. There were men grilling caribou sausages and Eskimo children holding miniature flags. Who would ever have thought that America would grow to encompass all this?

Soon after they arrived, Tom found some friends from school, and Howard stepped aside. He wandered around, talked to neighbors and coworkers he ran into. When the muktuk-eating contest began, he watched Tom up onstage with the others, gulping down black-and-white cubes of blubber and whale skin. And when the blanket toss got under way, he approached his son and tapped him on the shoulder like a boy asking a girl to dance.

They joined the group standing around the edges of the leathery blanket, everybody holding a piece and working together to move it up and down, propelling one person after another up into the air. There was a cheery feeling in the crowd, and Howard tried to breathe with the same rhythm, to enjoy the surprised cry of each new person who climbed up onto the blanket and felt themselves, for a few moments, freed from the ties of gravity.

When it was Tom’s turn, Howard jerked the blanket with the others, and he saw his son bounce up into the blue. He felt his body loosen, just the tiniest bit, and he laughed out loud at Tom’s shout when his feet hit the sealskin and he soared up again. Howard kept his eyes on Tom’s face as he flew and fell, coming in and out of focus. With each ascent, he became a blur Howard wouldn’t have known in a crowd, and with each drop, he settled back into the young man, nearly grown, who roused such a complicated range of feelings in his father’s chest. Howard remembered that when Tom was a baby, he hadn’t known how to answer the question “Who does he look like?” because there seemed to be such changeability to his newborn features. Howard could watch his son sleep and see one moment his own father and the next Marie’s mother, and so on through a dozen different expressions, until he understood finally what it meant to call a child “my flesh and blood.”

When Tom came off the blanket, he looked at his father with an open, questioning smile, and Howard smiled back and nodded. He worked his way onto the blanket and stood up in the very center. For a moment he was still, looking around at the circle of people he knew, friends and neighbors and coworkers who might or might not know him. And then they moved as one, and he was in the air.

It was not like jumping; it was not in his control in the same way that jumping would have been. He had no agency in this transaction. He simply rose and plunged, lifted by the hands of the community below. He was with them, then apart, with them, then apart. At his highest, he could see shacks of wood and sod, the ragged edge of the land and the dark water beyond. Radio towers and the White Alice antennas, and his son below him, his son.

He wanted to go higher, until he reached night, until he pierced the skin of the bright, endless day. He wanted to go until he hit the edge of the troposphere, wherever that invisible boundary might be, where men’s words flew back and forth, propelled by his own work. His voice was going without him, sounds flying out of his body without any volition. He yelled until even he wasn’t sure whether he was making angry noises or joyful ones. He rose and fell, free and weightless, a creature of earth and air. For a few moments he existed in a place between, nobody on any side of him, no one to hear him but the sky.

Excerpt from
TROPOSPHERIC SCATTER
By Octavia Frost
REVISED ENDING

Hi Lisa,

Still working on this one. I’ll get it to you ASAP.

Best, O

Chapter Eight

I stand for a minute at the edge of the crowd outside the Columbarium and study the scene. Of course, I knew that this would be a high-profile event, and that there would most likely be some media presence—the very reason I went to the trouble of buying new sunglasses and putting them on four blocks away. But now that I’m here and I see what a spectacle it is, it seems less likely that I’m going to be able to slip in undetected.

I feel I must clarify that I wasn’t worried someone might identify me from the covers of my books. Few writers enjoy that kind of fame, and I’m not deluded enough to think I’m among their ranks. I don’t get recognized, not when I sit on a plane with a manuscript on my tray table, title page up, not when I stand in a bookstore and purchase one of my own novels with a credit card bearing my name. Normally—or in the normality of the life I lived until Tuesday—it wouldn’t even have occurred to me to worry that someone might know who I was. But my picture has been broadcast so widely these past few days, always in pointed association with the murder of the very woman whose funeral I’m trying to crash, that I didn’t think I could count on not being noticed.

It turns out, however, that you can’t just walk into a celebrity funeral—which is what I suppose this has become—and casually join the rows of mourners, sunglasses or not. There’s security; I hadn’t counted on that. A man in an expensive suit is standing at the door with a clipboard, checking people against a guest list. And I don’t imagine my name is on it.

I stand back and try to figure out my next move. I feel foolish; I’m not even sure what I thought I could accomplish by coming here. I had some vague idea—not from any true insight into criminal behavior, but from a novel or movie, some other writer’s assertions about sociopaths and the way they act—that sometimes a murderer will feel compelled to join in the activity that follows his crime. Watch the faces in the crowd scene when the body is discovered; keep an eye on the guests who come to pay their respects. If I have any talent at all in social situations, it’s my ability to fade into the background and observe, and I suppose I thought that if I put myself in the right room, I might be able to zero in on a suspicious figure filling a plate at the hors d’oeuvres table, telegraphing his guilt to me and only me.

I watch the comings and goings for a little while. Guests arrive—no one famous, or at least no one I recognize—put on somber faces, and walk gracefully up the steps, pretending they don’t know they’re being photographed. Every so often someone comes outside to have a cigarette or to make a phone call. The windows of the building are all stained glass; no way to see inside.

I watch one of the smokers, a tall, slender woman who I think must be around my age, though she might, from a great distance, be mistaken for someone younger. She looks familiar, but I can’t place her—is she an actress? She has dark hair, short and artful, and she’s wearing a black skirt with a sleeveless, beaded top: funeral meets cocktail party. She looks good, though. It’s not something I could pull off.

She lifts her head and sees me watching her. I look away, embarrassed, and pretend to search for something in my purse. I consider approaching her and asking for a cigarette, but I’ve never been a smoker, and I don’t think I could make it believable.

When I close my bag and glance up again, I see she’s still watching me. She finishes her cigarette and drops it on the asphalt; then she begins to weave through the crowd in my direction.

I smile pleasantly, noncommittal enough that it won’t be too awkward if it turns out she’s going to see someone else. She walks closer, peers at my face.

“Octavia?” she says.

So much for my brilliant disguise. “Yes?” I say mildly. I’m nervous, ready to turn and retreat if she starts yelling that the murderer’s mother is here. But instead she puts her arms out and pulls me into a hug. I’m slightly uncomfortable—I still haven’t placed her—but I’m touched by the gesture, so unexpected, here of all places. It occurs to me that I’ve been hugged more this week than I have in a year or more.

“I didn’t expect to see you here,” she says after she lets go. “Though of course I’ve been thinking about you. I got your e-mail that you were in town.”

The pictures lock into their proper slots. “Lisette,” I say. “Lisette Freyn.”

“Bingo,” she says, taking out another cigarette.

•  •  •

There’s an analogy I came up with once for an interviewer who asked me how much of my material was autobiographical. I said that the life experience of a fiction writer is like butter in cookie dough: it’s a crucial part of flavor and texture—you certainly couldn’t leave it out—but if you’ve done it right, it can’t be discerned as a separate element. There shouldn’t be a place that anyone can point to and say,
There—she’s talking about her miscarriage
, or
Look—he wrote that because his wife had an affair
.

So Lisette Freyn—the living, breathing girl who dropped out of school to follow a rock band from city to city, the embodiment of all of our mothers’ worst nightmares, rediscovered years later as a casual online friend—has never found her way into my books. Just as it’s true (do I even need to say it?) that none of the fictional husbands I’ve written are Mitch, not exactly, and none of the children—loved and mourned and resented and worried over—are Rosemary or Milo. And none of the protagonists are me, except in the sense that of course they all are.

But the teenage girl in
The Human Slice
owes some of her fragile self-assurance to Lisette (or at least to my fragmented memories of her), and if Lisette were to peer into the surface of my books, looking for her own reflection, she’d find a handful of minor characters who share one or more of her traits: a gesture, a verbal pattern, a little piece of life experience. The story of Lisette Freyn has become part of my own inner mythology, a drop in the reservoir of history, memory, and invention that I dip into when my pen begins to run dry, until I almost forgot there was a real person at the center of it. But here she is, standing in front of me.

“What are you doing here?” I ask abruptly. “I mean,
here
…” I gesture toward the rounded building, the crowd of watchers. “Did you know … do you know the family?”

She nods, blows smoke through her lips. “Her mother’s an old friend of mine, from way back. Bettina was a beautiful girl.” She shakes her head. “It’s a terrible, terrible thing.”

“I agree,” I say firmly. “It’s awful.”

“I’ve never met Milo,” Lisette says, looking at me intently. “But I’m just about the only person in Kathy’s life who’s sticking up for him at this point. I keep telling her, there’s more to this story, and we can’t just make assumptions when we don’t have all the facts.”

I nod. “Thank you,” I say.

She crushes out her cigarette. “Well, I should get back in there. The service will be starting soon.” She looks at me curiously. “What are
you
doing here?” She points toward the Columbarium, as I did a minute ago. “I mean,
here
.”

I pause. “I don’t know,” I say. “I knew that it was happening today, and I just wanted to come. I don’t know why, I thought …” I trail off. Honestly, I don’t know what I thought. “I didn’t realize I wouldn’t be able to go inside, though.”

“Oh, you want to go in?” she asks. “I can get you in.” She smiles conspiratorially. She seems excited, as if we’re kids who are about to get away with something.

“Really?” I say. “Are you sure?”

“Sure. But keep your glasses on, and try to stay away from Kathy. She’d probably freak out if she saw you. And she can be a little … dramatic.”

That almost stops me. This isn’t a game; there’s a woman in there who has lost her child. I think of the memorial service we had for Mitch and Rosemary: a double funeral, rarer even than a double wedding. It was wrenching but also, strangely, the best day of the ghastly year that followed their deaths. It was a day when I was not expected to be strong for my son or to put the tragedy behind me and move forward to whatever might come next. There was no embarrassment in crying, no awkwardness in talking about the two of them as much as I wanted to. And I wasn’t alone, left by myself with a child I could hardly look at.

Paradoxically, that’s the thing—the memory of Milo, nine years old and so lost, my shame over being the kind of mother I was in those years—that makes me follow Lisette as she turns and starts walking through the crowd. I follow her up the marble steps, right up to the man with the clipboard.

“Hi again,” she says to him with a wide smile, holding up her pack of cigarettes. “I’ll probably be in and out a million more times. It’s an addiction.” And then, casually, as an afterthought, she puts her hand out toward me, as though she’s going to introduce us. “She’s with me, by the way,” she says. “She’s a dear friend.” And then she takes my arm and sweeps us inside before he can even answer.

•  •  •

The building is beautiful inside, everything marble and mosaic and gold leaf. There’s a central rotunda, three stories high and topped with a stained glass dome, surrounded by a circular path that edges the circumference of the building. I keep my head down as I walk through groups of funeral-goers, talking quietly to each other and pausing to examine the compartments lining every wall: little brass doors up to the ceiling.

“So,” I say softly to Lisette as we walk around the bending pathway. “A columbarium is a place where people store ashes?” I’m trying to remember my Latin. The root derives, I believe, from the word for “dove,” and I imagine each of those alcoves on the wall as a home for a bird, cooing and rustling and laying eggs, instead of a place that holds piles of ashes, the barest remains of human lives.

“Right,” she says. “There are no cemeteries in San Francisco—did you know that?”

“I did,” I say. “I was just reading about it this morning.” And I was, in my search for gravestones-that-aren’t-gravestones, trying to figure out where Milo might have gone on the night of the murder. But it’s also one of those things I might have filed away once in my mind: a corner of society so desperate for space that the dead are unearthed to make room for the living. A city that holds no ghosts; a metropolis reserved for the breathing. Present company excepted. “What happens to people who don’t want to be cremated?”

“They get buried in Colma, a little ways south of here. It’s all cemeteries there, cemeteries and car dealerships.”

“How far away is that?”

She shrugs. “Maybe twenty, twenty-five minutes down 101.” Unlikely, I think, that Milo would have driven that far in the condition he was in. I make a mental note to add this information to my hotel-letterhead timeline.

We walk slowly, looking at the vaults and niches on the walls. There are plaques with names and dates, as in any repository for the dead, but there are also glass-fronted cabinets where people have arranged mementos that remind them of their loved ones. I see a toy car, a picture of a man with a dog, a full bottle of brandy. Handwritten letters, silk flower leis, a thermos from a Batman lunch box.

“It’s a beautiful building,” I say.

“Yeah,” says Lisette. “Actually, this is where I vote. They put the machines right there.” She gestures toward the central rotunda, currently filled with folding chairs and a couple of tables set up with food and drinks. And then, vaguely, she continues: “Harvey Milk is in here somewhere.” Certain things are coming back to me about Lisette. I remember that she speaks in non sequiturs and then acts surprised that you haven’t been inside her mind to follow the same path.

“Not a huge turnout,” I say, looking around.

Lisette shakes her head. “The capacity’s pretty small. I don’t think you’re allowed to have more than fifty or sixty people. And Kathy wanted to keep it exclusive. She’s been negotiating selling the photo rights to a couple of different magazines. I think
Us Weekly
is ahead in the bidding.” I stare at her, and she shrugs. “It’s for charity,” she says. “She just didn’t want it to be a total circus.”

Lisette excuses herself to say hello to somebody. I’ve been deliberately keeping my back to the center of the room; I haven’t spotted Kathy Moffett yet, and I want to keep a low profile. But when Lisette walks away, I turn and scan the room. Even though the crowd that’s gathered here isn’t large, it’s decidedly glamorous. One thing that always strikes me as false in funeral scenes in films and TV shows is that everyone’s always dressed entirely in black: no dark blue suits, no splashes of color, no print blouses because that’s what you had in your closet and you didn’t have time to go out and buy something new. But that’s the way it is here. These people might have been outfitted by a costume designer.

There’s a stack of programs on a low table nearby, and I pick one up. The paper is thick and heavy. On the front there’s a picture of Bettina, standing in the sun, smiling, and the words “A Celebration of the Life of Bettina Amber Moffett, December 24, 1984–November 9, 2010.”

Lisette returns and puts her hand lightly on my arm. “People are starting to sit down.”