I'll Let You Go

by Bruce Wagner

  “The Gare de Lyon,” offered the old man.

  “They were shooting a scene where two people say good-bye. We hid behind the camera, watching. It was drizzling—très Parisienne. The actress stood on the platform while her ‘boyfriend’ boarded the train. The cars were already moving. You know: a real movie good-bye. She put her hand on her heart and ran along the track as he waved. He was standing in the door, on a step. No one smiled—the director didn’t want them to. She stopped running and the train kept going. They held the shot until the car was out of sight. The director called, ‘Cut!’ and everyone waited until the train came back to the station to its original mark. After a while, someone yelled, ‘Last looks’—that’s what they say when they’re about to shoot again. ‘Last looks! Final touches!’ The last chance for wardrobe and hair and makeup. Then the scene began again and the actress ran after the train and he waved and no one smiled and then she stopped just where she did before, and put her hand over her heart. Again, the train came back to its original position. ‘Last looks!’ More waving and chasing and chasing and waving, again and again and again. Finally, it was over and your father looked at me and smiled and squeezed my hand. I didn’t remember that until years later.”

  CHAPTER 12

  The Well

  In the days following the meeting in the Withdrawing Room, Tull went to school like a somnambulist—scattered, so to speak, to the Four Winds. He finally understood what Edward meant when summoning the word postictal (pronounced post-ik-tal, always with great flourish) to refer to the emptied, euphoric state that came over him in the wake of an Apert seizure. That is to say, Tull walked about in a kind of gauze; he felt an overall generic thankfulness; colors and scents seemed more vivid. As he floated indolently from class to class, building to building, ethereally benevolent toward his fellow students, the once cynically regarded campus revealed itself as a quaint and inconsequential place, a warm and fuzzy manufacturer of future nostalgia.

  Lucy and Edward were the only ones aware of the facts behind Tull’s “seizure.” Though Edward was perversely thrilled by the development, his poor sister grew morbidly beside herself. Deeply ashamed to be the snitching source of Tull’s pain and fearful to approach him, the redhead kept her distance. Unable to concentrate on the detective-book project, she sat at desk torturing herself for having delivered the coup de grâce—it was only a matter of time before a distant chorus of screams would announce that Tull had gunned down a dozen students or been found hanging from the top metal slat of the folding bleachers of the multimillion-dollar DODD AND JOYCE TROTTER GYMNASIUM. The truth would out and she’d soon be (nationally) marked: Lucille Rose, spoiled scion, had destroyed her adored first cousin because while on the way to visit their hospitalized grandmother (whom she was exploiting in the name of “research”) he had not paid enough attention to the prattling précis of her pathetically still unwritten Mystery of the Blue Maze. The horror of such ruminations came to a head when she startled herself awake with a reflexive gasp in the middle of European History. Boulder turned to scowl at the creepy little outburst—the outburst of a loser.

  Tull still thought of the homeless girl, and fantasized that the reassuring voice of the GPS would direct them to her. He would invite Amaryllis and her mom to Saint-Cloud for dinner and make Grandpa Lou give them money so they could move from their motel—to Malibu or the Marina. After his grandson’s recent trauma, how could the old man refuse?

  By dreamy smile and odd disaffection, Tull not so subtly advertised the intimate, intensely private revelation that had knighted him with its from-left-field melodrama. At such a tender age we’re as innocent as we are vain, and while it’s true Tull had his share of weepily beleaguered moments, he was not above considering himself the irresistibly charismatic star of a new school play called, say, The Wounded Boy.

  Having thus left the door open, it was inevitable that his nastier contemporaries would gather, as Grandpa Lou would say, a piece of intelligence, on their own; predictably, l’affaire Colonne still lived on in the memory of those peers of Trinnie’s who had begotten children way back when—such were the vagaries of coming of age in the town one was born. Hence, like an ungainly, standoffish bodyguard, Lucy found herself shadowing the boy she loved and had so casually betrayed. “Stop it!” she shouted when tormentors made their retarded Bride of Frankenstein/Invisible Man jokes about his father that cut Tull like daggers—“You better shut up!” They laughed until she cuffed the biggest one, hard. The bully almost struck back, but her coldly measured comment—“Touch me and my father will fuck your family”—dissuaded him. (The aggressor, like most of the student body, had laid curious eyes on Dodd Trotter, the bullet-headed billionaire, at the formal dedication of the gymnasium; and though his own father was a cruel Century City litigator, instincts told him not to call her bluff.) Reveling in the martyrdom of his “second act,” the Wounded Boy allowed Lucy to vent. If not exactly righting a wrong, she could at least salve her guilt.

  Things changed at home, too. Ralph stopped pestering him for comments about his script, and that was definitely a plus.

  As for his mother, Trinnie seemed at once lighter and heavier, like a ballasted ghost. She dressed elegantly, as always, but without the usual frivolity. She joked less, more droll than outrageous. Though she spent most of her time in the gardens, she had a warm, missionary smile for anyone who came along—she was effortlessly, agonizingly present. Even Bluey was surprised when her daughter moved from the bedroom that had been hers as a child into a guest cottage, which she kept uncharacteristically clutter free. Trinnie no longer had wine with dinner, and when speaking to Tull made sure to lightly touch his arm or hand, shoulder or cheek, like an otherworldly healer infusing with balm. She looked into his eyes when he answered; her own were clear as bells.

  And each day, Tull thought: my father must be dead. They’d hired a detective … yet how was it a body was never found? Didn’t they say a body always had to be found? Grandpa Lou would have scoured the ends of the earth, dug the deepest hole with spindly, spotted hands until he broke to the other side—he would have done that for Katrina, Tull knew. No: he must be dead, or good as. What a mediocre denouement for the drama of a gifted child! He raged at the walls while headphones blared Slim Shady, feebly rapping to slang he didn’t fully understand, a psycho Gilbert-and-Sullivan blizzard of miniature passion plays about duct-taped women thrashing in car trunks.

  “There’s someone here to see you,” said Winter.

  He stood bathed in the light of the Sub-Zero picking at cold Cuban chicken. Lucy appeared in the kitchen door, frail and diffident. The old nurse ducked out.

  “Tull …” she stammered. “I’m—I’m so sorry! You have to forgive me! I didn’t mean to—”

  She cried, and his heart opened up. The smell of her perspiration was animal, as if she’d been chased to Saint-Cloud by predators.

  “It’s all right, Lucy, really—”

  “No, no, it isn’t! It isn’t, it isn’t, it isn’t! It was so sadistic—all because you wouldn’t listen to my stupid book cover!”

  “It isn’t stupid. I like your book cover.”

  “You are so sweet!” Deliriously, she kissed him, and he blushed. “Why do I do things like that? Edward says I have a mean streak, like Mom.” She dried an eye with the butt of her palm. “Then you’ll forgive me?”

  He nodded, then sat forlornly on the stool Ralph favored during culinary rants and raids.

  “So: what are you gonna do?”

  “About what?”

  “You want to find him, don’t you?”

  “There is no finding him.”

  “That is bullshit, Tull.” He narrowed his eyes menacingly.

  Lucy quickly apologized, fearing she’d lost all the ground she had gained. “But you could find him, if you—”

  “He’s dead.”

  “No one knows that for sure.”

  “I said he’s dead!”

  She let him breathe for a minute—we
ll, maybe five seconds. He’d been through so much. “But did you talk to Grandpa?”

  “He said he hired a detective but they couldn’t find him.”

  “What did your father even do? I mean, for a living.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you ask?”

  “No.” Tull wondered what else she knew, and was withholding for the sake of rapprochement. “If my father were alive, Grandpa would have found him.”

  “I don’t think that’s necessarily true.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Grandpa Lou would not be terribly anxious to find someone who hurt your mother the way that man did.” He admitted she had a point. “But you should find him, for your own peace of mind.”

  “I don’t care,” he said, unconvincingly.

  “You don’t have to—but you should probably still make the effort. You need closure.”

  “Closure?” he said, with suspicion. “Maybe you’re the one who needs closure—for your book. You know—for research. I know how thorough you like to be. Because you’re such a great writer. Maybe you’re the one who needs closure so you can figure out how to end your book!”

  She listened to the tirade, eyes glued to the ground. “I guess I deserved that.”

  Tull thought that maybe he’d been a bit rough. He poked at the soggy plantains. “Besides,” he said, “I wouldn’t know where to start. I’m no good at ‘Missing Persons.’ ”

  Lucy tap-tapped psychedelic decal’d nails on the marble cutting board, squinting her eyes—the girl detective again. “The trail is cold, but the Internet, you know, is … hot.”

  Not far away, in a modernist villa on Stradella Road, cousin Edward lay in bed attended by his mother. A Gucci scarf pinned to a goose-down pillow shaded his head, its hem stopping short at the brow. Liquid brown eyes watched her sponge his small frame; today he was too tired for the tub.

  Joyce Trotter was older than her husband by nearly fifteen years. Approaching sixty (having had Lucy at forty-five and Edward at forty-seven), she carried herself with the presumption of an actress who had retired in her prime and was now only rarely glimpsed, someone of whom the world might say: Still so gorgeous! She had mitigated the tragedy of her son’s unhappy lot with the compulsive maintenance of her own body. Though she desired to prolong and enhance her femininity, Botox and herbal wraps hadn’t really softened her—Ashtanga and kickboxing instead bestowed a Brentwood warrior’s mannish, sinewy glow. Sclerotherapy erased spider veins and Autologen was injected into nasolabial folds (a lab in New Jersey was busy farming collagen from three millimeters of skin taken from behind her ears); the men on Roxbury Drive had rolled up AlloDerm, an implant made from the dermis of human cadavers, surgically inserting it in her lip, and applied erbium laser to forehead. Mistakenly diagnosed with Lyme disease, Joyce flew to New York on the BBJ to have her blood pumped with a synthetic amino acid. Horrified that she leaked urine during a particularly torturous Pilates session, she immediately had a “designer” vaginoplasty and anterior colporrhaphy to restore the dropped bladder to normal position.

  But dark clouds hung overhead that would not disperse. They had tried so long and so nobly to have children. Joyce saw a hundred specialists, but nothing worked; she combed Russia and China for little ones, but could never commit. Then came the magician of Santa Monica. He was going to use her womb as an incubator for another woman’s eggs—Joyce was giving herself preparatory injections when by mistake Lucy happened. Well, why not? She knew plenty of fortysomethings who were knocked up. What was modern technology for? Then she wanted another, and the magician made it happen. Presto: eyebrows were raised—there were always the doomsayers, including her mother-in-law, who wasn’t thrilled from the beginning that her son had chosen une femme ancienne. Is it safe? they would ask. Are you sure that you want to? You were so lucky with Lucy … so blessed. What if the child—and she knew he was damaged, of course she knew, because the magician had told her so, but then she met with Father de Kooning and was certain she would have it. She would have it. And people were not happy! Years later, the Four Winds Mommies, scourges of the silent auction/Pediatric AIDS/carnival-booth charity circuit, tacitly indicted her for Edward’s plastic fantastic skeletophantasmagoric woes … she could feel it. She smelled it in their eyes, their hair, their smiles, their very teeth as they pushed thousand-dollar prams stuffed with bawling bundles of gorgeous DNA. (Since Apert’s wasn’t a “recessive,” the odds of Lucy having a child so afflicted were astronomical … as were those of Joyce and Dodd if it were possible for them to have another, which of course it wasn’t. Wasn’t that a consolation?)

  “Think he’ll snap?”

  “Who?”

  “Tull.”

  “Edward, don’t be silly.”

  She used a little bit of alcohol to swab beneath the brace, then rubbed his pale skin with Camelia Iris from E. Coudray, his favorite. Say what he would to Lucy and Tull, he secretly adored her. These were the only times—her touching him—that Edward felt alive.

  “He’s been acting pretty weird since he found out.”

  “I think that’s normal—an attention-getter. The whole thing has been quite a shock, I’m sure.”

  “Have you talked to Trinnie?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “And Grandpa Lou?”

  “Today.” She smiled. “What are all these questions?”

  “Is Grandpa Lou angry that Tull found out?”

  “I think he’s relieved.”

  “What about Trinnie?”

  “Seems better than ever.”

  “She isn’t mad?”

  “Why would she be?”

  “At you and Dad. For snitching.”

  “No one snitched, Edward.”

  “Lucy did.”

  “It’s better that Tull know. He’s of age—he would have found out. He should have been told. How can you keep a thing like that quiet?”

  “You couldn’t.”

  “Very funny,” she said, smirking. “I always thought it was handled poorly.”

  “Mommy”—that’s what he called her when they were alone—“what would make someone leave like that?”

  “I don’t know. Marcus was always kind of a nutjob.”

  “He didn’t love her? He didn’t love Aunt Trinnie?”

  “I’m sure that he did.”

  “Did you know him?”

  “Not very well.”

  “What was he like?”

  “Edward, I’m late.”

  She screwed the lid on the iridescent green lotion, then drew the thin down quilt over his whiteness, gently kissing his cheek.

  “Are you going to another funeral?”

  “Yes.”

  “I never told you this before,” he said, clearing his throat. “But I—I really respect the work you do.”

  “Thank you, Edward.”

  She kissed his bare cheek again, just under the hem of the scarf.

  “I guess,” he said, “you can’t explain certain things—what makes someone leave. Tull’s dad … or what makes someone throw a baby into a dumpster.”

  “No—you can’t explain.”

  “Guess that’s just the world, huh?”

  “Part of the world. An ugly part, but just a part.”

  Joyce Trotter stood at the Castaic grave near Grasshopper Canyon.

  The breast of her son still flitted before her like a haunted, broken bird’s.

  “Can you hear the freeway?” asked Father de Kooning. “It sounds like a fountain. Jesus was tired, and stopped at a well—Jacob’s well. He asked a woman for water, and she said, ‘You are a Jew and I am a woman. How can you ask me for water?’ Jesus said, ‘If you knew who I am, you would ask me for water. With the water in this well, you will still have thirst. With the water I give you, you would never know thirst again because it would be like a fountain inside you.’ ”

  There were about forty gathered there. She had dressed down for the burial, in simple earrings and b
lack Donna Karan sheath; the sun highlighted the chalky outline of water stains from the sponge bath. The small box about to be lowered into the earth held a two-year-old, found in the trash. Joyce had been informed that as in some infernal Rugrats episode, the diapered boy had scaled the garbage and draped himself over the metal side of the bin before dying in balanced repose, like a tiny-tot prisoner shot in mid-escape.

  “Thomas Aquinas wrote,” said the pastor, “ ‘It is me who Jesus was looking for—not water. It is me.’ ” He crossed his hands over his chest. “It is you”—he nodded to the mourners. “It is the seven buried children Jesus was looking for when he sat at the well.”

  There were seven now—seven anonymous babes she had helped bury in as many months. Today’s child, Joyce had named Jakob. It still tore at her to know that in the eyes of the law, the new christenings were only symbolic; the interred must remain Jane and John Does, forever.

  They stood listening to the indifferent fountain of the freeway while a young girl walked forward with a basket and released a dove, for Jakob. It hovered there, taking Joyce’s breath away. Another basket released six more that soared above as the mourners arched their necks. The lone dove rocketed to the others—as if choreographed by a maudlin god, they moved this way and that in unison, a school of wondrous flying fishes in a topsy-turvy sea before erasing themselves in the smog of infinity.

  As Joyce drove back to Bel-Air, it occurred to her with a shudder: she had never named him. Fourteen weeks in the ICU and her son had had no name. Then one day, her husband suggested Edward. Depressed and spent, she acquiesced.

  CHAPTER 13

  Imaginary Prisons

  Dodd Trotter was, as his precocious daughter averred, the eighteenth-richest person in the world—or thereabouts, given market fluctuations.† If his total worth, as construed by available SEC filings, were divided by America’s GNP (a financial monthly had merrily done the math), his estimated personal wealth would equal a rough 0.19 percent of the U.S. economy. That is how this sort of money multiplies: it rises and converges, thunders, pelts and showers, then, like a perfect storm, leaves rainbows all around.