The Nobodies Album (26 page)

Walking through the house afterward
, I’m thinking,
it was impossible to separate the cumulative ruin into different strands: how much had been caused by the murder, how much by the police, how much by the day-to-day effects of a relationship that, depending on who you asked, was either loving and warm or fierce and treacherous
. This isn’t unusual for me, this kind of narration; most of the time, I hardly notice I’m doing it. But now, as I draw back to listen to myself, I’m surprised enough that I stop and stand still. I see what I’m doing: I’m crafting the kind of sentences that might appear in a memoir.

“Write what you know” has always seemed unnecessarily limiting to me. I prefer instead, “Know what you write.” You want to inhabit a character who’s a banshee or a soil scientist or a Mesopotamian slave girl? Fine. Just make sure you get it right. Make it real; make it true; find the details to convince me.

But it’s impossible, isn’t it, to escape writing what you know? That slave girl may be able to pickle locusts and read omens in animal entrails, but she also knows how it feels to kiss your husband in the dark. When her hair is shorn so that her forehead can be branded, she will cry your twenty-first-century tears. And if she has a child, he will have your son’s eyes and his heartbreaking capacity for worry.

I can’t avoid it; that’s what I’m saying. I can’t
not
write about Milo, because he’s there, in every story I try to tell. What I
can
do is look at the two of us as clearly as I can. Give myself time to sort, and distance, and disguise. Set my own rules for privacy; decide what to keep to myself.

I walk past a bathroom that wasn’t on the video—it’s nicely appointed, but if it has any particular theme, it’s too subtle for me to identify—and into Milo’s practice room. It’s spare and fairly empty, with a stage at one end, set up with various pieces of equipment: amplifiers, microphones, a selection of guitars arranged on stands. There are no windows in the room, and the walls are lined with fabric-covered squares that I think must be soundproofing panels. If a writer had been plotting her murder, Bettina probably would have died in here.

There’s one other doorway in the room, and it leads to Milo’s office. In the
Turf Wars
clip, it had seemed as if the entire room were papered with fan letters, but I see now that it’s only the back wall. Amazing to see, all these things that strangers feel compelled to give my son. There are poems and drawings, photos of topless girls who look barely old enough to be in high school. Love notes and hate mail. An e-mail from a father whose teenage son died in a car accident, telling Milo that they’d played Pareidolia songs at the funeral. A child’s letter, written in crayon, asking Milo to come to his birthday party.

There have certainly been times when I’ve wished that being a writer brought more public recognition with it, more chance of fame. But I think I’ve always known that it’s not something I’d really want. Several years ago, on a trip to Key West, I visited Hemingway’s house and was astounded to find—there in the courtyard, where Hemingway swam and drank and did God knows what private things with assorted wives and friends and guests—a machine for making souvenir pennies with the author’s face on them. I thought it was funny, the juxtaposition of art and kitsch, the opportunism of a tourist industry willing to slap anyone’s face on a coin if they think people will buy it. But it also made it clear that the tourists they were gouging, me included—and yes, I made my penny, which cost me a total of fifty-one cents—weren’t any different from tourists visiting, say, Ripley’s Believe-It-or-Not. A group of us, following the tour guide, making notes about six-toed cats and imagining that walking through rooms Hemingway walked through will give us insight into anything besides what kind of pillow he liked to sleep on. Imagining that we’re studying literature, when we’re really just looking for something to do before the bars open in a town where Ernest Hemingway is accorded the same status as Jimmy Buffett.

I walk slowly through the room. There’s a single shelf of books, none of them mine, and I spot Milo’s high school yearbook in between a rhyming dictionary and the most recent edition of
This Business of Music
. A sofa next to a table holds photographs; again, no sign of me, but there are several of Milo with Rosemary and Mitch. I pick up each of them in turn, though it’s not really to look at them. They’re all pictures I have at home: Milo holding newborn Rosemary (adults hovering just outside the frame, on alert for sudden toddler movements), Mitch standing in front of a car he’d just bought. What I want is to touch the objects themselves—solid weight, bright colors behind glass—to hold in my hands something that Milo and I own together.

The last thing I stop to look at is a line of frames on the wall, but they don’t contain pictures. When I get close enough, I see that they hold sheets of paper full of lyrics written in Milo’s tight, crowded scrawl. All songs I know, songs from the albums, but for the first time I can see the process by which he wrote them. I can see words crossed out and verses abandoned. That “Your Brain on Drugs” started life with the title “Cracking the Shell,” and that the couple described in “Atomic Mass” originally met at a party instead of a strip club. It’s the creative impulse made visible, and it makes me think that there’s always something arbitrary about finishing a song or a novel, choosing the point when we can declare it “done.”

I sigh and head back toward the staircase in the entryway. I’ve got to go up there sooner or later; no point avoiding it. I climb up, thinking about Milo, imagining his footsteps that night, but there’s no special insight to be gained from retracing his steps.

On my way up, I’m trying to get my bearings, to think which side of the house the bedroom might be on. I know it faces the bay; I remember the view of water from the windows, the sliver of red from the Golden Gate visible when the camera caught the angle right. But when I get to the top, I see that I’ll have no problem finding the right room. All I have to do is follow the marks on the floor, the trail of footprints and dirt and dark coins of blood.

I walk toward the room, which is at the end of the hall. On the doorjamb there’s a bloody handprint that I know for a fact is Milo’s; it’s one of the more lurid details that have been made public. It looks to me like he grabbed at the doorway to steady himself on his way out of the room. I think, incongruously, of kindergarten projects I have stashed in the attic somewhere, hands that share these same fingerprints, but smaller, dipped in brown paint and turned into Thanksgiving turkeys.

I step inside the room and let myself look it over slowly, white linens and wood floor, mottled Rorschach of black and dark crimson. It’s a lot of blood, though maybe less than I’d been imagining. The largest stain spills from the flat plain of the bed over the side and onto a downy white rug that I imagine was chosen for its kindness to bare feet. She was standing next to the bed, they’ve said, when the first blow came. The attacker was standing to her left, and the force of the hit knocked her sideways onto the sheets, which is where she was when the weight made contact with her head again. Amazing that they can know all this, that they can look at a broken body and stained sheets and deduce angles of impact and order of events. That they can find answers by charting the spots where the blood fell as the weapon was raised anew. A story written in droplets. Divination by spatter.

I try to shock myself by slipping my brain this piece of information: whoever stood in this bedroom and lifted that weight, whoever brought it down with full knowledge and intent, it’s almost certainly someone I’ve already met. Perhaps—and I have to allow for this possibility—someone I know well.

This is where the montage would go, if this were a movie: Each of the suspects picking up the murder weapon, one by one. Each of the different paths that might have led, inevitably, to this single outcome. This is where I would lay out clues, sort through timelines of personal betrayal and algebraic equations of romantic entanglement, known and possible. Search the ground for places where anger and jealousy might have taken root.

I realize I’ve been holding my breath. This, what I’m looking at … it’s not frightening, the way I thought it might be. This is not a horror movie or a Halloween haunted house. It’s the nucleus of a human tragedy. A life ended here, and the circumstances under which it happened—however wretched, however monstrous—should not be the focus. This spot marks a boundary, an endpoint, and I feel unexpectedly solemn. I have an impulse to kneel down, to press the palm of my hand against the stain on the rug, and I do it before I can think of the reasons I shouldn’t. I let myself feel it, the place where the fibers go from soft to brittle, and I offer my silent eulogy.

I stay there for a few moments, and it’s while I’m paused like that on the floor that I hear the double chime, the one that signals the opening of the front door. I stand up, my heart beating faster even as I run through the reasonable possibilities that someone might be entering the house. Did I say I didn’t find it scary, being in this room where a murder has taken place? Apparently that was bullshit.

I walk out of the bedroom as quietly as I can and make my way to the top of the stairs. Looking down over the railing, at first I can’t see anything beyond the solid flank of the door, the slant of it blocking whoever’s on the other side. Then it closes, and I hear it latch. And Kathy Moffett comes into view.

From the Jacket Copy for
CRYBABY BRIDGE
By Octavia Frost

(Farraday Books, 1994)

A
lannah Ringgold died angry. After discovering that her husband had been having an affair, she drove off in the rain to confront him, only to skid through a guardrail on a bridge and plunge into the water below.

Now, devastated by her separation from her twelve-year-old son and unwilling to leave her child in the care of the man who betrayed her, Alannah finds herself stuck in the earthly realm, unable to move on to whatever might come next. She haunts the new family whose lines have been drawn in her absence, and places her son in the center of a custody battle between the living and the dead.

Excerpt from
CRYBABY BRIDGE
By Octavia Frost
ORIGINAL ENDING

I wonder how long we might have gone on like that—me hovering, watching you through a pane of glass like a nervous mother on the first day of preschool, making my presence known only through the occasional unexplained thump or flicker of the lights. Maybe years, if I hadn’t heard that one sentence pass your lips. If I hadn’t heard you call her “my stepmother.”

It is said that a mother who sees her child in danger can do amazing things. We are ferocious when we need to be: we will beat off the attacker with a baseball bat; we will find the strength to lift the car off the near-broken body. You called her “my stepmother,” and the fury that coursed through me gave me power. I knew suddenly that if I wanted to, I could knock this whole house down with my grief and my need. I could lay its inhabitants flat.

It’s the middle of fall by now, a few days before Halloween. Last year—my
last
year—I remember you dressed up as Charlie Chaplin; none of your friends even knew who that was. But this year the tide has turned, and the boys you know have decided they’re too old for trick-or-treating. Instead they want to scare themselves and each other. Our town is a little too sterile, a little too tidy, for the kind of abandoned houses that kids can convince themselves are haunted. But we do have one site worth visiting on a dark Halloween night, and it’s a nice synchronicity that urban legend and personal history have come together so cleanly. You’re going to spend the evening at Crybaby Bridge.

According to tales that have haunted this region far longer than my ragged spirit has, I’m not the first person to spend her last seconds in a shaky drop on the other side of that iron railing. The details vary, depending on whom you ask and what lesson they want to teach, but most people agree that the story begins with a mother and a child. Was the woman an unfaithful wife? An unmarried schoolgirl? No one’s sure. But she’d done something wrong, that much is clear, and she wanted to clean the slate. She came to this bridge with her newborn baby, and she dropped him over the side. Some say she threw herself after him, and others say she lived to face her punishment. But ever since, if you sit on the bridge when the moon is out, you’ll hear something strange. A baby. The sound of a baby crying.

There’s a related legend involving a stalled car—supposedly if you drive to the middle of the bridge and turn off the engine, the car will begin to move under its own power, and later you will find tiny handprints in the dust on your rear bumper. But you, of course, are not old enough to drive, and neither are your friends. You’ll be taking Option A, the simpler and purer of the experiments. You’ll be listening for the baby’s cry.

The boys who are your friends now are not the same ones I knew just a few months ago. There’s been a bit of a restructuring, the kind of gerrymandering of friendship that happens so often in adolescence. You, by virtue of having suffered a loss they cannot fathom, have become a kind of shaman figure, a role that will reach the pinnacle of its usefulness on the night of October 31. They want to find a ghost, and they figure that if anyone can summon it, it will be you.

I follow you from room to room as you get ready to go out. You’re putting together a costume of sorts—that’s everyone’s cover story, because what parent would approve of this little anthropological expedition? You put on long-john bottoms, then a pair of black pants—the dress pants I bought you for the holidays last year, too short already—which you roll up to the knee. You tuck in a baggy white dress shirt you’ve taken from your dad’s closet and tie a long winter scarf around your waist like a sash. Black sneakers, because the only boots you have are snow boots, and they’re blue. You put on the tricornered hat we bought at Colonial Williamsburg, and you’re a pirate, or close enough. If I were here, really
here
, I’d find that old stuffed parrot you used to carry around. I’ll bet I could pin it to your shoulder. But I’m not here, and you don’t really care about the costume anyway.

You’re carrying an old canvas tote bag I got free once from a travel agency; ostensibly, it’s to hold all your candy. What it really contains is a thermos—your old Ninja Turtles thermos, for Christ’s sake; why is there no adult supervision?—filled with a combination of Coke and a tiny bit of liquor from every bottle you could find. This is another part of the plan, and I’ll bet you anything someone shows up with cough syrup.

You go downstairs, into the living room, and there
they
are, so cozy on the couch, watching TV. They exclaim over your costume, your pathetic thrown-together costume that anyone can see is nothing more than an afterthought. I focus my energy, knock a magazine off the coffee table. The bitch has chosen a new tactic for responding to my outbursts: she’s ignoring me. She calmly picks the magazine up and places it back on the table, careful to keep her face neutral. She stands and walks over to you, straightens your hat, and then she has the nerve to lean down and kiss you on the goddamned cheek. And your reaction, your shy needy smile, cuts through me like a blade. I wait until she’s stepped away from you, until that hideous light fixture she picked out is right above her head. Then I rally my fury, squeeze it into a tight ball, until one of the bulbs shatters, sending tinkling little shards down into her hair. That gets a reaction: she flinches and I have the satisfaction of seeing a flash of fear cross her face. But only for a moment. Then she composes herself and continues giving you a list of instructions about staying safe while you’re out.

You say your good-byes. And they let you go. Later they’re going to go over this moment again and again, and they’ll never be able to decide what they should have done differently. They may not even make it past the pain that’s coming their way—their relationship isn’t weathered enough to withstand much thrashing—but I’m surprised to find it makes no difference to me either way. It’s you I care about. They can go to hell.

You leave the house without putting on a jacket; you’re going to be cold, though I don’t suppose that’s something I need to worry about for much longer. And you walk off to meet your friends at the site of your mother’s death.

I may as well tell you, there are no ghosts at Crybaby Bridge, at least none until I arrive. It’s possible that something terrible happened here once—many terrible things, perhaps—but there’s no spectral baby crying out for his mama, no wailing woman searching for the child she’s forsaken. What there are instead, if you need an explanation, are bare branches and wind, the movement of water and the call of the occasional owl. And several generations’ worth of overactive imaginations.

But I feel some kinship with this nameless mother, this imaginary murderess whose story exerts such power over children as they edge toward adulthood. All of those nightmare figures, real and legendary, drowning our children in bathtubs and rivers: we are not monsters. We are human. Nothing less, and certainly nothing more. Ordinary women until you appeared, our children, making us into something else. You, floating, a nucleus. You started off inside us; no wonder we think that to protect you we have to consume you.

I circle you as you walk. I wonder how you would feel if you knew I was here, if you knew what job I’m prepared to do tonight. I remember once when you were small and you had just learned what it meant to die. You were frightened, and it was too big for me to explain, and I was trying to find a way to make it seem less dire. “It’s not something to be scared of,” I said. “The day you die is the day you find out the answer to the biggest mystery of all.”

But it turns out I was wrong, because I still don’t know what happens to
most
people when they die. They’re not here, I know that much. Those of us who stay behind are relatively few. We are the ones they refer to in Asian folklore as “hungry ghosts.” Wanting and empty, we roam around, trying to find what we need to fill us. But it’s no use. Our mouths are like pinholes, our bellies the size of the moon.

I don’t know where the rest of the dead go, and I don’t know if I am fated to join them someday. If there is another realm, I don’t want to go there, not unless I can take you with me. I am here because I need to be, for your sake. I have to believe that the choices I’ve made have been the right ones. I have to believe I’ve always acted with love.

•  •  •

Time fades in and out in that way it sometimes does for me, and I’m afraid I’ve missed my chance, but when I stabilize, I see that you’re sitting with your friends on the span of the bridge itself. I hadn’t realized they’d closed this part of the road to cars, and I wonder if it has something to do with my accident or it’s just part of some long-planned project to streamline the flow of traffic.

You’ve been drinking the vile mixture you composed in the thermos that I used to fill with chocolate milk, and you’re getting a little wobbly. So much the better. You’re all taking turns telling scary stories; every one of you, apparently, knows someone who knows someone who found a dead body hidden in a hotel mattress or hatched spiders from an innocuous pimple on her cheek. Whenever there’s a quiet moment, someone makes an exaggerated crying noise—
waahhh!
—and you all laugh with relief.

The place where my car broke through the railing hasn’t been fixed, just covered with plastic webbing and caution tape, and I see you looking at it from time to time. I’m angry, suddenly, at these boys, who brought you here without thinking that it might cause you pain, and the force of the emotion gives me strength.

I move away from you and drift down until I’m just above the surface of the river, right at the spot where I felt my last terror, where my car filled with water and my human travels came to an end. And with the gathered rage of every mother whose child has ever been taken from her, I make two things happen at once: I flare myself visible, my woeful figure manifesting itself momentarily against the sky, and I make a noise that sounds like your name.

It lasts only a few seconds, and if you look down too late, you’ll see nothing but tangled grass and black water. But you look exactly when I hoped you would. You don’t call my name—you’re too aware of the other boys and what they might think—but you stand up like you’ve been shocked, and you walk unsteadily toward the broken place in the railing.

Your friends behave predictably: they think you’re making a joke, and then they get worried and start telling you to come back. You’re at the edge now, looking down, a few sheets of plastic all that stands between you and the drop. I can’t see your face, just the angle of your head. We are so close to reunion, so close, and I pull together my hope and my fear and I show myself to you one more time.

You make a mournful noise, a wounded noise, and lean farther over the edge. One of the boys is coming up behind you, and he yells out and tries to grab your arm, and you step away from him and stumble. And you fall.

I watch you plummet, watch you struggle in the air, and for a moment I’m afraid. The part of me that remembers being alive, that knows the rhythm of breath drawn in and breath released, wonders if I have done something unforgivable. But I acknowledge the feeling and let it pass. I am your mother, and you belong with me. Some things are not negotiable.

You break the surface and I plunge beside you. I will stay with you, my baby, during your time of distress, and I will be there when you come through on the other side. Finally I’ll be able to pull you to me, and we’ll float together, and I’ll be holding you close at last.

I wish I could do it for you, but I can’t, so I just stay near. Soon there’s nothing but the glow around you and your choking voice and my joy lighting the water. We sink down together toward the mud and the silt, and it ends and it ends and it ends.