The Nobodies Album by Carolyn Parkhurst Page B

disturbed. And the absurd spy-novel nature of this transaction makes me wonder if there’s some reason he doesn’t want to discuss this with me directly. I can’t for the life of me think why he would sit with me for half an hour, saying nothing of any import, then pass me this cryptic message in such an oblique way. Did he think someone would be watching us? I look around the café, but no one seems to be paying any attention to me. What made him think I would look inside the bowl right away? I might well have put it in my suitcase, carried it home, and not opened it up until the next time I decided to have a tea party. And above all, why go to all this trouble to convey something so vague? “Someone is lying” isn’t exactly “Colonel Mustard in the conservatory with a candlestick.” Maybe he’s gotten eccentric in his celebrity, and this is just his preferred method of communication. Maybe I should write the word “Who?” on a piece of paper and pass it to him in a coffee creamer.
    Carrying the box gingerly back to my hotel, I try to convince myself that the note means nothing. Joe said that he hasn’t had the thing for very long; the note was probably already in its hiding place, left over from a game of charades two or three owners ago, when Joe’s girlfriend received the sugar bowl from some anonymous eBay seller.
    But.
    I wonder for a moment if it could be a message smuggled to me from Milo, but I realize immediately that that’s pure fantasy. Milo is, for the moment, a free man. If he has something to tell me, there are more direct ways he could do it.
    Back in my room, I place Joe’s gift on the dresser and lie down once more across the bed. It’s late afternoon and I’m exhausted. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now. If this were a mystery novel, the note in the sugar bowl would spur me to take some action. With my child’s life in the balance, I would charge forward and begin investigating the case on my own. I would track down waiters and convenience store clerks; I would visit seedy nightclubs and interview the victim’s friends. More clues would follow: there would be a bellboy at my hotel who would turn out to have an unusual connection to the crime; a stranger would hold a door open for me, then press a phone number into my hand as I passed through. Everyone would have an easily describable quirk. And the murderer would turn out to be the last person anyone would suspect.
    I fall asleep wondering how good a writer I would have to be to bring us to a happy ending.
    •  •  •
    There’s a story I haven’t been able to get out of my head, one you might have heard: A family of three, by all appearances happy and self-contained, falls prey to an intruder. A thief enters their home and ransacks their belongings, leaving the family’s most vulnerable member, their beloved child, hungry and bereft. Happily, the mother and father rise up and do what is right: they eject the invader, thereby protecting their child and maintaining the careful balance of their lives. Is there any parent who wouldn’t do the same?
    During the months after my daughter, Rosemary, was born, Milo asked to hear the story of the Three Bears at least five times a day. Mitch and I were pleased at how well Milo seemed to have adjusted to the presence of the new baby, but we did notice that he clung to small rituals in ways he hadn’t before, wanting to keep his baseball cap on even in the bathtub and insisting that his cereal be served in the same bowl every day. (This is only one of a hundred scalpel-edged memories I’ve been scraping myself with over the past few days; the image of Milo, small and worried in his red cap, never fails to break the skin.) The Three Bears became a part of our daily cadence in those months, as regular as feedings and diaper changes.
    Somewhere around the three- or four-hundredth reading, it occurred to me that I had never before noticed the subtext of this story, the ancient