The Nobodies Album by Carolyn Parkhurst Page B

was psyched when I finally found it. And now it’s served another purpose, too—it’s kind of led to this.” She draws a line in the air between the two of us. “You know, us getting together.”
    I’m not sure I follow her logic, but I don’t want to get off topic. “Did you happen to look inside it?” I ask. “When it came in the mail? When I opened it up, there was a note inside that said, ‘Someone is lying.’”
    She bursts out laughing. “Are you kidding?”
    “No. So you don’t know anything about it?”
    “Well, no, but I doubt it’s anything. I got the box, literally, like four days ago, and I only looked inside long enough to make sure it was in one piece. Who knows why anything else would be in there? But I doubt it had anything to do with you.”
    “Oh,” I say. I feel strangely let down. “Okay.”
    “But you know,” she says, “it’s funny. That’s something Bettina used to say. Like, if the guys stayed out all night and tried to give us a lame excuse or something. She’d say it in this funny way, like she was imitating someone. It was kind of a private joke, I think, between her and Milo.”
    “Huh,” I say. I have no idea whether or not that’s relevant. I follow Chloe back down the hall. She takes a sweater from a hook by the door.
    “Ready?” she asks.
    I shake my head. “Probably not,” I say.
    “It’ll be fine,” she says. She opens up the door, and we step outside.
    •  •  •
    The last time I saw Milo, as I think I’ve mentioned, he was getting ready to board a plane. That’s the way I tell the story in my mind, incidentally; those are the words I always use. I’ve often wondered if writers are the only ones who feel compelled to narrate their lives as they live them, to stand in the shower and wonder whether there’s a less predictable word than “lather.” I used to think it made me a good writer—look at me, honing my craft as I stand here to pour a cup of coffee, drafting and revising my descriptions of the mug, the smell, the sound of the hot splatter! Now I just find it tiresome, though it doesn’t seem to be something I can stop. An end to narration: that’s what I imagine death will be like.
    In any case, this sentence is as good as it’s ever going to be: the last time I saw Milo, he was getting ready to board a plane. It was the week between Christmas and New Year’s, and we’d had a good time together. That’s the unhappy irony; if we’d had the kind of visit we usually had, tense and angry and haunted by old ghosts, then the next link in the chain of events might never have been forged. But Milo was in a good mood and, presumably, feeling rather generous about the foibles of his old mother; at least, that’s the conclusion I drew from the terse note he sent the following week. Like thousands of travelers every day, he stopped at the airport newsstand to buy a book. And for the first time in his life, he decided to pick up one of mine.
    I’ve wished sometimes that the book Milo bought at the airport that day had been The Human Slice . Published just five months after the events of 9/11, The Human Slice was not my most critically acclaimed book, but it was my biggest seller. The popular theory is that readers were in exactly the right place to appreciate a novel about characters whose minds are magically wiped clean of trauma and sadness. Maybe this is true, and maybe it’s not; the reasons people buy books are personal and arbitrary, and trying to analyze it does nothing but clutter a writer’s mind. The fact remains that, for whatever reason, in 2002 people bought this book in droves. If four years later Milo had picked up that book, my gentle fable of forgetting and perhaps even forgiving, then he might have come away with a different understanding of my intentions.
    But when he took his seat in first class that day and read for the five hours he had between taking his last breath of Boston’s air and taking his first of San