The Nobodies Album Read Online Free PDF Page B

in police custody.
    I’ve got three newspapers on my tray table, and each of them has a front-page story about my son. In this strange age of technology and information, in which news is practically injected straight into our veins, replaced with a fresh drip each quarter hour, nothing is ever final. I’m sure that by the time I disembark, the story will have already changed. But at this particular moment, the world knows only this: Bettina Moffett, age twenty-six, was found in the home she and Milo shared at eight-thirty in the morning on November 9. She was lying in bed; her skull had been crushed with a ten-pound exercise weight. She was discovered by their housekeeper, Joyce Tung. (Odd to think of my son as a man who employs a housekeeper. It’s not something I ever would have expected of him.) When Ms. Tung arrived, she used her key to let herself in, as she always did; the door was, as usual, locked from the inside. What was not usual was the view she came upon when she walked into the house: Milo asleep on a couch, his face and hands smeared with dried blood. Ms. Tung left the room quietly, without waking him, and continued upstairs with a feeling of unease. Shortly thereafter, she found Bettina’s body and called the police. Milo woke sometime later, dazed and apparently hungover, to find an assortment of officers surrounding the couch, looking down at him impassively. (Please note that the expressions on the cops’ faces are not explicitly discussed anywhere; that detail is my own contribution to the Milo Frost mythology currently under construction.)
    The three articles contain largely the same information. Each one lists the same key points about Milo’s background— He is, along with guitarist Joe Khan, a member of the band Pareidolia, whose most recent album , December Graffiti, has produced four top-ten hits, including “Devastate Me” and “Your Brain on Drugs” —and each paper has found some high school classmate of Milo’s who’s willing to say he was occasionally sullen as a teenager. Each story ends with a quote from Bettina’s mother, Kathy Moffett, guaranteed to bring tears to the reader’s eyes. There are several to choose from; she’s been busy in the last twenty-four hours. It’s like she’s been practicing for this moment. Bettina was born on Christmas Eve, and I always said she was my angel here on Earth , one paper reports. And another: I always knew she was too good for this world . And perhaps my favorite: The last words she ever said to me were “I love you, Mom.”
    This isn’t the first time that Bettina’s mother has entered my consciousness. Though it’s easy for me to make fun of her overblown phrasing, I believe that she is telling the truth about having a close relationship with her daughter. I’ve seen her in photo after photo, hovering and trailing, always at the edges of the scene; her presence in Milo and Bettina’s life together has been impossible to miss. Milo, Bettina, and Kathy carrying Starbucks cups. Milo, Bettina, and Kathy arriving at the airport. She and I look nothing alike—she’s tall, blond, firm, where I’m smaller, darker, softer—but she’s become a kind of doppelgänger for me. Living a life that could be mine, if I could only figure out how to swap our positions. This is where a mother might go; in today’s performance, the role will be played by Kathy Moffett.
    Milo has said (through a statement by his lawyer) that he’s not guilty. He says that he was sleeping on the couch because he and Bettina had argued over dinner—indeed, witnesses place them in a nearby restaurant, speaking in intense, hushed tones around nine-thirty—but that they had gone their separate ways afterward and he hadn’t come home until almost two a.m., at which time Bettina was (he says) upstairs, sleeping peacefully. He passed out on the couch and remembers nothing more until the police arrived. But a man who was out walking his dog around eleven p.m. says