Unexpectedly, Milo - Matthew Dicks [25]
After all, it was more difficult to deceive an enemy than a friend.
Milo assured Andy that he would not forget his laptop and hung up the phone. After a long walk with Skywalker and another dinner of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, he settled down on the couch to finish the first of the fourteen tapes he had found in the bag. Unlike during his previous viewing, he now had a purpose. While watching Freckles’s video diary, he would be looking for clues to this mystery woman’s identity. For this purpose, a legal pad and a pencil sat on the futon beside him and the dog.
Milo debated watching the fifteen minutes of footage from the previous day, concerned that he may have missed an important clue. But, anxious to see more of the tape, he vowed to review the first fifteen minutes in the event that he found no other means of identifying the woman. Connecting the camera to the television via the cable that he had purchased, Milo pressed the play button and watched the last few moments of kite flying before Freckles appeared on the screen.
This time she was indoors, sitting on a patterned sofa of beige and blue. The camera appeared to have been placed on a coffee table; the frame cut off the very top of Freckles’s head. She was wearing a gray sweatshirt with a Champion label, blue sweatpants, and ankle-high white socks. She was sitting cross-legged, and behind her, on the wall above the couch, hung what appeared to be a metallic sculpture of twists and curves, though most of it, like the top of her head, was not within the frame. It appeared as if she had pressed the record button and sat down on the couch, for she was still settling in as the recording started. A moment later, she began to speak.
I just got back from Mira’s wake and it was awful. Dreadful and horrible and so goddamn sad. Her poor mother. And all those people crying and crying, and all of them there because of me. Mira and her mother and her friends and even those funeral home guys, standing outside in their black suits, trying to look sad while getting paid, all there because of me, and they didn’t even know it.
Freckles stopped for a moment, sighed, and craned her neck back as if she were looking at something on the ceiling (Milo knew that she was only pausing to collect her thoughts). Then she resumed.
I felt so guilty standing there. And I never know when to leave. And why do the guys all stand in line with their heads bowed, staring at their shoes, their hands folded in front of them like they’re trying to cover up their dicks? Are they afraid that the Grim Reaper is going to come along and try to castrate them with his goddamn sickle?
Milo paused the tape and stood up, then folded his hands in front of his body as Freckles had described, and smiled with the realization that she was right. He could actually picture himself assuming this pose in the past while waiting to shake the hands of grieving loved ones at his father’s funeral, perhaps adding an embrace when appropriate, and even one of those manly, back-slapping hugs that guys often perform as a public assertion of their heterosexuality.
Before resuming the tape, Milo picked up the legal pad and jotted down the words Mira? Dead? Obits? Surviving mother. Father?
He thought that he might be able to locate a recently deceased girl named Mira (a thankfully uncommon name), and that doing so might lead him to someone who knew Freckles. With that thought, he added Need a photo to his legal pad, thinking that he could print a still frame of her face from the video in order to help identify her. Then he pressed play again.
We’re all just standing there, waiting for the awfulness to happen so that it could finally end. Waiting for the moment