The Nobodies Album Read Online Free PDF

color—falls to his chin. A lock of it slips over his face as he’s led forward. Somewhere, in an envelope, I have a few strands of that hair, saved from his first haircut. It was lighter then, and finer. If I wanted to, if I was willing to spend some time with the boxes in the basement, all my cardboard archives, I could find that envelope and run my fingers through that hair. I could marvel at how silky it once was.
    After I’ve watched the news story all the way through a couple of times, I pause the recording so that Milo’s image is fixed on the screen. I look at the picture, my son in handcuffs, and use it to test myself. How does it make me feel? I don’t cry; I did that in the hotel and on the plane ride home, and for the moment I’ve run dry. I feel instead the way I felt for a stretch of months eighteen years ago, when Milo was a nine-year-old boy, forever sticking out at odd angles from pajamas that had grown too small, and I was a widow who had never published a word. A great welling fear, and something that might be called despair. A feeling of intangible loss; a certainty that nothing is ever going to be okay again.
    When Milo was little, before I’d suffered any real losses, I would look at him sometimes and imagine that I’d just heard the news of his death. That was a test, too. The horror I felt, the surge in my guts and the stinging at my eyes, the need to reach out and touch the solidity and wholeness of his body, would satisfy me. Yes, I would think. That’s how a mother is supposed to feel. Before Milo was born, I’d imagined the love a mother feels for her child to be a solid thing, completely unshakable. I thought it would be like a coat—rather cozy, something that can be added to the self without changing the flesh underneath. I didn’t understand yet the way that love can scoop you out; I didn’t know that each time a new channel of care and attachment forms, it carves something else away.
    I think sometimes of the Etch A Sketch Milo had as a child. When he was nine or ten years old, he took it apart to see how it worked. I was surprised by what he discovered; it turned out I had the whole thing backward in my mind. I had imagined that by turning the dials to move the stylus, the user was drawing metallic dust to the other side of the glass. I’d thought it was this dust that made up the lines. In fact it’s the opposite: the inside surface of the screen is coated with aluminum powder from the moment you shake it, and when you turn the knobs, you draw the particles away. The lines you draw represent an absence of the dust, not its presence. It’s possible, with enough time and care, to draw a design dense enough to clear the screen completely. Scribble over a big enough area and you can see right through the glass to the machine’s dark innards.
    My love for Milo—and for whatever reasons, it was not quite the same with his sister—has always been fierce, but it has not been unchanging. Sometimes the lines of it are drawn so clearly, are so complex and overlapping, that they seem to cover every inch of me, laying open everything that lies below. But when something happens to shake the ground between us, the surface of that emotion can turn—for just a moment—blank and opaque. Looking at it, you’d never know there had been a picture there at all.
    •  •  •
    Morning. Today begins, as yesterday did, with me sitting on a plane. This time, however, my fondest wish is not to be recognized. I’m going to San Francisco. Of course I am. I have little idea of what I’ll do once I get there, but sitting at home is not an option.
    I made phone calls on the way to the airport—the head of the English department where I teach, canceling my upcoming classes; my mother in Fort Lauderdale, who needed reassurance, though I had nothing reassuring to say. I haven’t yet made any attempt to contact Milo; I don’t have a current number for him, and as far as I can tell, he’s still