Read Online The Nobodies Album by Carolyn Parkhurst - Free Book Online

familial rites of betrayal and reassurance that get played out within its narrative. The baby will wear your old clothes , we tell our children; she’ll sleep in your old bed, and we’re proud you’re such a big boy that you don’t need them anymore . Fuck that, the story says. Three is enough for any family. And no matter how many times the narration is interrupted by the screeching cry that belies the story’s message, no matter how distracted your mother seems as she recites the words from memory while fastening the soft little leech to her breast, the ending is always the same. Baby Bear always wins.
    Children, with their feral sweetness: it can break your heart. Once I understood, I made an effort to put the baby down in her crib or on a blanket before sitting down with Milo to read the story, so that he could lean into me, sad little turnip, without finding that my arms were occupied by somebody else. But the truth was—and maybe I already knew it—that this was a balancing act I would never quite get right. In the metaphor of the family romance, when you fall in love with a second child, does it mean you’re betraying the first? Sometimes it feels that way. And sometimes, holed up in bed with my new little one—sleeping, nursing, sleeping, while Mitch attended to Milo’s more complicated needs and questions and occasional tyrannies—I enjoyed the illicit pleasure of it.
    Every moment leads to every other. Volcanoes don’t erupt without warning, and now, in this new Pompeii, my task is to sift through the levels of ash and pumice to find artifacts of lives lived before the disaster. Do I believe it’s possible that Milo killed Bettina? I don’t know; I really don’t. I have no idea when it is that I stopped knowing him utterly, which moment marks my first failure of maternal empathy. And so I examine; and so I dig. And in the ruins of my memory, I find evidence that supports both versions of history.
    •  •  •
    I wake up in that state of grief where you can tell you’ve been mourning even in your sleep. I’ve been dreaming of Milo as a child, in a series of fragmentary scenarios: Milo hot with fever, Milo digging a hole, Milo lost in a crowd. It’s just after four a.m., and I’m pretty sure I’m up for the day.
    Apparently room service doesn’t begin until six, so I brew weak coffee with the machine provided in my bathroom and sit to drink it in an armchair in the corner. I feel agitated; I can’t stand the hush, the middle-of-the-night solitude. I’m too distracted to read, and turning on the television feels like an assault, so I turn to the new-world cure for loneliness: I open up my laptop.
    I’d like, I suppose, some comfort or fellowship, but I’m not sure how to find it. I type my troubles into a search engine like it’s a diary. I find articles about murderers from every corner of the world and about the million ways their mothers pray for them, but nothing that tells me how I can make this situation more bearable. Finally, steeling myself, I type in “Milo Frost.” I just want to see a picture of his face.
    An onslaught of horrible links follows—news stories, blog screeds, one site that purports to have video of Bettina’s body being taken away in a bag—but one phrase catches my eye: FreeMilo.com. I click.
    The site is profoundly distasteful, I can see that right away—it bills itself as “out to protect our boy Milo, whether he killed the bitch or not”—but I’m fascinated by it. I browse the message boards, which cover topics ranging from fairly cogent analyses of the facts that have been made public to speculations about which Pareidolia song would be the best soundtrack for murder. There’s an entire thread devoted to the band’s name: what it means, which band member chose it, whether it might shed any light on the current situation. Here, at least, I feel I have a little more insight than the average reader. I’m the one who taught him the